SpaceX is going to deliver Nickelodeon slime to the space station for science
After a trip on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Nickelodeon's green, gooey slime will make its debut in microgravity.
Nickelodeon's green slime will go into orbit soon.
Space is about to get slimy. SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch of a Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station this month will ferry a lot of gear and supplies into orbit, including Nickelodeon's slime, a gooey green substance made famous by the network's shows for kids.
In the Nickelodeon universe, slime gets everywhere: in your face, in your hair, on your lap. The astronauts on the ISS will try to keep the slime from turning their orbital home green. They have a very specific set of experiments on the schedule.
The crew will play slime pong with hydrophobic paddles, toss slime-filled balloons, make slime bubbles and even spray each other with slime.
Nickelodeon's Slime in Space logo looks like a mission patch.
This will be the first ever sliming in space, Nickelodeon said in a media advisory.
We don't know who the lucky crew member will be just yet. NASA's Christina Koch and Nick Hague are currently on the ISS along with cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. Three new crew members are set to arrive later in July on a Roscomos Soyuz flight.
It all sounds like fun and games, but there's an educational component. The astronauts will be demonstrating how a non-Newtonian fluid behaves in microgravity.
A non-Newtonian fluid is "a material in which its viscosity (resistance to flow) changes based on the amount of shear stress applied to it—for example, through squeezing or stirring," the ISS US National Laboratory explained in a statement.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 resupply mission, slime and all, is scheduled to launch no earlier than July 21.
If you can't wait for space-slime, you can make some of your own to play with down here on Earth. Just be sure to obey the laws of gravity.
