A reduced-gravity aircraft is a type of fixed-wing aircraft that provides brief near-weightless environments for training astronauts, conducting research and making gravity-free movie shots.
Versions of such airplanes were operated by the NASA Reduced Gravity Research Program, and one is currently operated by the Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration Programmes of the European Space Agency. The unofficial nickname "vomit comet" became popular among those who experienced their operation.
Parabolic flight as a way of simulating weightlessness was first proposed by the German aerospace engineer Fritz Haber and his brother, physicist Heinz Haber in 1950. Both had been brought to the US after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. As well, Shih-Chun Wang studied nausea in astronauts for NASA, which helped lead to the creation of the vomit comet.
Parabolic flights are sometimes used to examine the effects of weightlessness on a living organism. While humans are by far the most common passengers, non-human animals have occasionally been involved in experiments, including a notable experiment on how weightlessness affected a domestic cat's righting reflex and a pigeon's attempts to navigate in a weightless state.
The aircraft gives its occupants the sensation of weightlessness by following a parabolic flight path relative to the center of the Earth. While following this path, the aircraft and its payload are in free fall at certain points of its flight path. The aircraft is used in this way to demonstrate to astronauts what it is like to orbit the Earth. During this time the aircraft does not exert any ground reaction force on its contents, causing the sensation of weightlessness.
Initially, the aircraft climbs with a pitch angle of 45 degrees using engine thrust and elevator controls. The sensation of weightlessness is achieved by reducing thrust and lowering the nose to maintain a neutral, or "zero lift", configuration such that the aircraft follows a ballistic trajectory, with engine thrust exactly compensating for drag.
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Weightlessness is the complete or near-complete absence of the sensation of weight. It is also termed zero gravity, zero G-force, or zero-G. Micro-g environment (also μg, often referred to by the term microgravity) is more or less synonymous, with the recognition that g-forces are never exactly zero. Weight is a measurement of the force on an object at rest in a relatively strong gravitational field (such as on the surface of the Earth). These weight-sensations originate from contact with supporting floors, seats, beds, scales, and the like.
Space adaptation syndrome (SAS) or space sickness is a condition experienced by as many as half of all space travelers during their adaptation to weightlessness once in orbit. It is the opposite of terrestrial motion sickness since it occurs when the environment and the person appear visually to be in motion relative to one another even though there is no corresponding sensation of bodily movement originating from the vestibular system. Space motion sickness can lead to degraded astronaut performance.
David Randolph Scott (born June 6, 1932) is an American retired test pilot and NASA astronaut who was the seventh person to walk on the Moon. Selected as part of the third group of astronauts in 1963, Scott flew to space three times and commanded Apollo 15, the fourth lunar landing; he is one of four surviving Moon walkers and the only living commander of a spacecraft that landed on the Moon. Before becoming an astronaut, Scott graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and joined the Air Force.
The main goal of my research is to establish guidelines for workplace design based on human biomechanics: specifically sitting workplaces and handling areas in 1/6G-1/3G (Moon, Mars) conditions. Such a workplace could be used in long-term space missions in ...
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Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via ...
Here we present measurements of surface tension and viscosity of the bulk glass-forming alloy Pd43Cu27Ni10P20 performed during containerless processing under reduced gravity. We applied the oscillating drop method in an electromagnetic levitation facility ...