(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article ,
Jens Kieffer-Olsen wrote:
I take it that gravity on Mars being a mere 38% of that in the
experiment has little bearing on the evaporation rate?
Very little. And as a practical matter, it's virtually impossible to
reproduce that anyway...

Airplanes in free fall are used to produce brief periods of zero
gravity, so why not let a slight trust emulate .38G?

No need for a slight thrust; emulating lunar or Martian gravity is just
a matter of flying a slightly shallower parabola. It's been done
occasionally. But the available time at reduced G is too short for
some things; I think it would be quite a trick to get measurements of
things like this in the time available.

Moreover, there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to believe reduced gravity should
have any effect on the evaporation rate of water, any more than it would
affect the boiling point or freezing point of water.

Gravity is quite simply UTTERLY IRRELEVANT to any process governed by
microscale physics. Gravitation is only important when bodies are large
and/or all other accelerations are small --- neither of which are true
of individual molecules of water.


-- Gordon D. Pusch

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