“Driving wheel!”

“This is a hoist to drag closer American shuttles or it may be a laser gun for defense.”

“Since this is a craft (sort of a space ship), then it must be a periscope?”

“Probably it is a MHC – Mini Hadron Collider :)!”

“It might be a cosmonaut weight-measuring instrument, but you hold it as if it were a Sumo wrestling simulator – not to look unfit in comparison to [Japanese astronaut] Soichi :)”

Of course it’s a mass-meter! Spiritius was the first to guess:

“It is a tool to measure weight. Alexander Serebrov once spoke about it in his ‘Lesson from Space’ (many thanks to him for such an interesting narration).”

Those of you, who know English, can easily translate it – “a mass-meter” are scales.

But as you may understand, it’s not that easy to get weighed in zero gravity. There is no weight!

I am proud to say that this gadget was created by Russian scientists! And as far as I know, European scientists attempted to create their own scales for the Station, but failed ;) And our mass-meter was created back during the MIR Space station!

The principle is easy: there is a spring mechanism and an electronic unit. When unloaded, the spring makes a certain number of oscillations. And when you fix yourself on the scale, the spring is depressed and it produces oscillations of different frequencies. These oscillations, or to be more exact their frequency is the key to weighing.

Did you like my riddle?

So here is another one – what’s in the picture?

Via Russian space agency Roscosmos

Click to enlarge