• Question: how can artificial gravity be used in missions to other planets

    Asked by Jude Norris to Charlie 🚀, Andrea, Col Op, Kirsty, Vinita on 17 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by ThePyroMatt.
    • Photo: Kirsty Lindsay

      Kirsty Lindsay answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      There are 2 main ways artificial gravity could be used.
      1. Spin the whole spacecraft- this is pretty complicated and the spacecraft would have to be very big so that the rotation speed is low enough that people don’t feel sick.

      2. Use a short arm centrifuge for the crew. There are a few different design ideas as to how this could be done at the moment, but this looks like the best idea for AG on long term missions.

    • Photo: Andrea Boyd

      Andrea Boyd answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      You could have a module of the spacecraft that spun like they did on The Martian so you could have artificial gravity in one place at least for long duration missions. There were plans to have a rotating module like that on the ISS but it got cancelled due to budget cuts and flight dynamics concerns but mostly money reasons 🙁 That’s a big pity because it would have been very interesting to see if it worked and fine tune the engineering for a rotating module. It would have made the attitude control way more challenging too! Maybe we’d have had way more than just four control momentum gyroscopes..

Comments