SPACE EXPERIMENTS BY DA RIVA'S TEAM

The space experiments performed by the team of the late Prof. Da Riva are here revisited on the occasion of the international congress organized to celebrate Prof. Legros retirement, both of them coworkers at the European Space Agency on fluid science research under microgravity. Emphasis is on experiment aboard the Spacelab laboratory, where the international cooperation has been at its most, but experiments performed on sounding rockets are covered in detail too. The main theme of the experiments carried out by Da Riva's team on microgravity platforms concerns the mechanical stability of long liquid columns under the large variety of disturbances that may arise ether accidentally or intentionally, both as a test-bench for theoretical developments on the behavior of capillary systems unmasked by the overwhelming gravity force, and as a contribution to the modeling of the floating-zone technique used in crystal growth.