REAL LIFE NEWS: CREATING ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY
by Hazed
There’s no getting away from gravity – at least, not here on Earth. But despite all its downsides, in making our bodies ache and sag, doing without it causes big problems too, as astronauts have discovered.
Zero-g, or microgravity, sounds like fun (unless you suffer from space sickness) but it messes up the cardiovascular system, affects the bones and damages the immune system.
So finding a way to provide artificial gravity would be of huge benefit.
One method we have known about for ages is to use rotating structures to simulate gravitational acceleration. It was a Russian scientist who first came up with this idea back in 1896, and it’s been used in science fiction – think of the rotating space habitat in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
NASA conducted an experiment to produce artificial gravity in 1966. The crew of the Gemini 11 mission rendezvoused with another vehicle and the two were joined with a 100 foot tether. The idea was to rotate around each other, producing gravity on the ‘floor’ of the Gemini capsule.
Click the source link below to see a video of this attempt.
So did it work? Well, after a fashion. It did produce some artificial gravity, but only a small amount.
There are other problems with using rotation to produce a semblance of gravity. The main one is that if you stand on the ‘floor’, or the outside of the spinning ship or space station, your head will be closer to the axis of the spin, which means it will be moving at a different rate to your feet. Cue dizziness, not to mention problems trying to walk.
The way to deal with this is to make your space station large enough to reduce the effect, and to keep the number of revolutions per minute low. An engineering challenge that is probably beyond our current capabilities.
