The mosquito , one of the most annoying insects of the summer season, is capable of flying in the rain despite the fact that a single drop from the sky weighs 50 times more than this tiny insect . How is it possible? Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) have used high-speed footage to unravel the mystery. And they have discovered that it does this thanks to its strong exoskeleton and low mass. According to the engineer David Hu and his colleagues, mosquitoes receive low-impact forces from raindrops because their low mass makes the drop hardly lose speed during the collision. "The collision force must be equal to the resistance of the insect, and the mosquitoes are so light that they hardly offer resistance", the researcher emphasizes. That is why they are not "thrown to the ground" when it starts to rain. "If we repeated the experiment with a similar impact on a human scale, no person would survive: it would be like being stopped on the highway and being run over by a moving car or bus," says Hu, who has published his results in the magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ).
The researchers say that what they learned from these insects could be used to improve the design of flying microbots and other small automata used in military and rescue operations.
