 Using equipment supplied by Brookhaven Instruments Corporation in New York State, provided the key to solving fundamental problems in condensed matter physics, and lead to revolutionary new "designer" materials for the manufacturing industry.They flew their apparatus, called PHaSE (Physics of Hard Spheres Experiment), into space in April 1997.It was one of a number of projects participating in NASA's Microgravity Science Laboratory-1 mission, aboard the Columbia.