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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: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 08 2019, @05:12PM
That's not all together clear. The further away you get, the larger your receptor area needs to be, though, and at some point you'd need an auxiliary mirror to make it work. But those large receptors make mobility a problem. Another approach to consider is a generator system in lower solar orbit. (You'd probably need a few, because the orbital velocities would be so different.) Beamed power through space ought to work well, but it could be quite complex to set up and keep running.
FWIW, I've often thought that the SPSS people have it wrong. They need to start with a relatively small system, and use it to power space missions out beyond Mars orbit, where solar cells aren't sufficient. (Those systems, so far, are by definition mobile.) Once they get a small version built and debugged, THEN they can talk about transmission to ground by a large system. Or possibly even powering a rocket during takeoff. (Well, that last thought may be a bit beyond the reasonable...except indirectly, via a ground station.) The thing is there's too many pieces of untested technology in the system, so the first thing to do is build a small, relatively simple, version that does something without any catastrophic failure modes.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.