[SteveJanesch]

Gotta get my hair splitter out...wait...oh, here it is.

There's a whole lot here that we don't know - that article is basically a sound bite. Having not seen the experiment ourselves, we don't know what Doi meant by "flew the same way it does on Earth". Did it just curve a bit, or really come back to where it was thrown? Was it a really-scaled-down experiment? If I recall correctly, last time I threw a boomerang it traveled in about a 25 foot radius and up to 15 or 20 feet in altitude. I'm pretty sure the inside of the ISS isn't that big.

I'm a little confused now about the contribution of gravity to the boomerang's flight. Was the experiment performed repeatedly and with the same results in different orientations? I recall that the boomerang's trajectories (bank, climb, radius) are sensitive to their orientation at release as well as forward speed and spin, and that the boomerang banks differently as it follows its path. Doesn't the sensitivity to orientation have to be the influence of gravity, if forward speed and spin are constant? If gravity is out of the equation, wouldn't the boomerang follow a perfectly circular path (which wouldn't be "the same way it does on Earth")?

Can't wait for the video.

- Steve