Astronaut Chris Hadfield will rocket into space in December aboard a Russian Soyuz space capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) where he’ll serve as the station’s first Canadian commander for six months.

And while he’s there Hadfield will also be running an experiment for SFU physics professor Barbara Frisken, who is part of a North American team investigating how colloidal alloys react away from gravity.

Frisken met with Hadfield in Montreal in September to discuss the project, a follow-up to her team’s 2009-10 space station experiment.

Colloids are microscopic particles suspended in another material such as a liquid. For example, explains Frisken, milk is a colloid of butterfat globules dispersed within a water-based solution.

“Scientists study colloids for two reasons,” she says. “A better understanding of their suspension properties can lead to the discovery of new materials and new methods of processing materials.

“And colloidal suspensions also serve as excellent models in place of atoms and molecules, with the advantage that they can be seen more easily.”

On Earth, however, these colloidal suspensions can’t be easily studied because the particles quickly sink due to gravity.

The experiment studies colloidal suspensions that separate into three phases: gas, liquid and crystal.

In their previous work, Frisken and her teammates were surprised to find that in space, instead of forming three separate regions, the colloids began to form a unique crystal gel that prevented full phase separation.

The discovery, which may ultimately help with designing new plastics, is detailed in the Nov. 9 issue of Physical Review Letters.

The new experiment will study seven different colloidal suspensions to explore how the crystals behave in each one.