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Artificial gravity breaks free from science fiction
Artificial gravity has long been the stuff of science fiction. Picture the wheel-shaped ships from films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Martian, imaginary craft that generate their own gravity by spinning around in space.
Now, a team from CU Boulder is working to make those out-there technologies a reality.
The researchers, led by aerospace engineer Torin Clark, can't mimic those Hollywood creations—yet. But they are imagining new ways to design revolving systems that might fit within a room of future space stations and even moon bases. Astronauts could crawl into these rooms for just a few hours a day to get their daily doses of gravity. Think spa treatments, but for the effects of weightlessness.
[...]"Astronauts experience bone loss, muscle loss, cardiovascular deconditioning and more in space. Today, there are a series of piecemeal countermeasures to overcome these issues," said Clark, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. "But artificial gravity is great because it can overcome all of them at once."
[...] In a series of recent studies, [they] set out to investigate whether queasiness is really the price of admission for artificial gravity. In other words, could astronauts train their bodies to tolerate the strain that comes from being spun around in circles like hamsters in a wheel?
The team began by recruiting a group of volunteers and tested them on the centrifuge across 10 sessions.
But unlike most earlier studies, the CU Boulder researchers took things slow. They first spun their subjects at just one rotation per minute, and only increased the speed once each recruit was no longer experiencing the cross-coupled illusion.
[...]The personalized approach worked. By the end of 10th session, the study subjects were all spinning comfortably, without feeling any illusion, at an average speed of about 17 rotations per minute. That's much faster than any previous research had been able to achieve. The group reported its results in June in the Journal of Vestibular Research.
Clark says that the study makes a strong case that artificial gravity could be a realistic option for the future of space travel.
"As far as we can tell, essentially anyone can adapt to this stimulus," he said.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 07 2019, @05:51PM (1 child)
Yep. You can't take a terrestrial ship, and throw it over a mountain. That's why they built the Panama Canal. Nor can you take a real spaceship, and toss it out of a deep gravity well. You probably shouldn't get it very far into the moon's well.
Construction shacks. Yeah, they'll be miserable little shacks, that people work out of for as long as necessary, and no longer. Something similar to off-shore workers. The pay is great, so they tolerate the conditions for a couple months at a time. Then they come ashore to spend all that money, and live it up.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 08 2019, @03:01PM
Actually, so long as it stays in freefall the depth of the gravity well probably doesn't matter except to fuel costs - nothing in the solar system, except maybe the gas giants, has a deep enough well to generate tidal effects strong enough to be an issue for something designed to accelerate. It's landing on the surface, or dealing with the stresses of traveling through an atmosphere, that adds a completely new set of engineering constraints.
Of course smaller vessels will still have a significant advantage in that they can user pinwheels, etc. to enter and exit gravity wells with close to zero net energy consumption. Pinwheels are especially good at that - massive momentum batteries that can store the momentum shed by landing ships, and give it back to launching ships at a later time with very nearly 100% efficiency. And of course they're not limited to launches and landings.