Chris Hadfield demonstrates how astronauts wash their hands in zero-g

Uploaded on January 30, 2013

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Chris Hadfield demonstrates how astronauts wash their hands in zero-g

2013-01-30 - During a video link with His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, who was accompanied with 200 grade school students from Ottawa, CSA Astronaut Chris Hadfield demonstrates how astronauts wash their hands in the weightless environment of the International Space Station. (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA)

Nicholas(inaudible): Hi, my name is Nicholas (inaudible) from Corpus Christi School in grade 6. My question is how do you wash your hands with soap and water in space?

Chris Hadfield: How do we wash our hands? Nicholas, I brought something to answer your question. Look closely at the camera, you can see this. It is no rinse body bath no rinse body bath. And it's a bag with a straw. So now, let's demonstrate. Okay, it's time to get clean, I'm going to squirt some water out. So we have a big ball of water and you put it on your hand. And now I've got water floating around on my hand. And so I wash my hands up with that and then grab a towel and dry them off.

So that'show we do it. We use no rinse, it's a special type of slightly soapy water so you don't need to have a bunch of fresh water afterwards. You squirt it, youf loat a ball of water in front of yourself and then, you just dry your towel. And when you're done, we just tuck our towel somewhere to let it air dry so that the evaporated water getsback into the space station and we can use that water again. So it works pretty well. Sort of like, maybe sort of like if you were on a sailboat, you needed to get clean, you'd do it sort of the same way.

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