Artificial Gravity, When in Space we could create
Artificial gravity for comfort and health benefits
The simulation of the pull of gravity aboard a space
station, space colony, or manned spacecraft by the steady rotation, at an appropriate
angular speed, of all or part of the vessel. Such a technique may be essential for
long-duration missions to avoid adverse physiological (and possibly psychological)
reactions to weightlessness.
The idea of a rotating wheel-like space station goes back as far as 1928 in the writings
of Herman Noordung and was developed further by Wernher von Braun. Its most famous
fictional representation is in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which also depicts
spin-generated artificial gravity aboard a spaceship bound for Jupiter. The O'Neill-type
space colony provides another classic illustration of this technique. However, there are
several reasons why large-scale rotation is unlikely to be used to simulate gravity in the
near future. In the case of a manned Mars spacecraft, for example, the structure required
would be prohibitively big, massive, and energy-costly to run.
A better approach for such a mission, and one being
explored,
The gravity ferris in the Jupiter spacecraft in 2001 is to
provide astronauts with a small spinning bed on which they can lie, head at the center and
feet pointing out, for an hour or so each day, so that their bodies can be loaded in
approximately the same way they would be under normal Earth-gravity. In the case of space
stations, one of the objects is to carry out experiments in zero-g, or, more precisely,
microgravity. In a rotating structure, the only gravity-free place is along the axis of
rotation. At right-angles to this axis, the pull of simulated gravity varies as the square
of the tangential speed. Another way to achieve Earth-normal gravity is not by constant
rotation, which produces the required force through angular acceleration, but by steadily
increasing straight-line speed at just the right rate. This is the method used in the
hypothetical one-g spacecraft.1
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