Past 5th of December, SpaceX CRS-19 mission has been successfully launched. Inside this mission, there was the ESA FOAM-C Experiment (Foam and Optics Mechanics - Coarsening). Understanding the phenomena that influences the stability of foams and emulsions is necessary to efficiently developing more advanced products and applications. Creating the right type of foam on demand is tricky and studies on Earth are complicated by the influence of gravity. Liquid flows downwards on Earth and foams are torn apart by gravity pulling on the bubbles. A European Space Agency (ESA) experiment onboard the International Space Station (ISS) enables astronauts to perform a study on foams in weightlessness because the bubbles are evenly spread rather than the larger bubbles floating to the top. Experiments on-board the ISS have shown that foams are more stable under microgravity because they remain wet. It has even been possible to make pure water foams! By pursuing foams research in microgravity, we can obtain better information and models to set the most optimal conditions to produce and assemble products containing foams as well as to more efficiently and effectively suppress foams through antifoams agents. GTD GmbH provided a ground software for preparation, analysis, and evaluation of the experiment’s science data. The software allows live monitoring of the data acquisition by the operator of the ground station at B-USOC and access to the digital correlator data and correlation function for scientists. The experiment will start providing real data in February 2020
