How cool is it to be an astronaut? Pretty incredibly cool.
Recently on board the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman and European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst studied the science of water surface tension in microgravity on board the ISS.
Unrestricted by gravity, water is pretty sticky thanks to surface tension. It wants to stick to itself in a ball, or like a glistening, blobby glove on an astronaut's hands, as you can see in the video.
In the video, the astronauts created a softball-sized bubble of water and then gently pushed a sealed GoPro camera inside it. They recorded the event with a 3-D camera. That view is embedded below (you'll need red-blue stereoscopic vision glasses to see the 3-D effect).
At one point in the video an astronaut holds the bubble with both hands and the image is reminiscent of the alien "water tentacle" from the movie "The Abyss."
