What is IDGE??
IDGE is a project that researches how materials (like metals) solidify.
This is an important area of technology, as it comes into play in everday
life quite often!
Take a look around you and make a note of all the metal things you see.
It would be fairly safe to say that most of these things were at one time
in the liquid form. 
Metals like steel and aluminum are often cast directly into the shapes
you see, but even more likely, the metal started out as a liquid, way back
at the beginning of its manufacturing life.
If you were in business making things out of metal, like say casting an
engine block for a car, you would want to know some very important things
like:
-
How long will it take for the casting to turn from liquid to solid? (after
all, Time is Money!!!)
-
How strong will the engine block be?
-
How quickly will it rust?
-
How hard will it be to do things like drill holes in it?
All of these things are very important for manufacturing
engineers to know, since they affect the cost and quality of the product.
The IDGE project was created to help answer some of these questions. While
scientists and engineers have learned a lot about these things in recent
years, there are still many unanswered questions that can only be answered
through experiments like the ones that IDGE performs.
The key issue is that gravity affects the way things solidify, and
this makes it very difficult for engineers to predict what will happen
when you cast that engine block. Put another way, it is simply too difficult
to make any predictions about what gravity will do, unless you know
what will happen when there isn't any gravity to complicate everything.