When it comes to experiments in space, astronauts on the International Space Station face challenges you won’t find on Earth: bubbles don’t rise, things float away and many Earth-based lab tools don’t always work the same way. So science in space needs to me reimagined from the ground up.
A NASA scientist explains how we study life, chemistry and physics in orbit.
Our Proba-3 mission recently pulled off its first-ever autonomous formation flight — aligning with the Sun and holding position for hours, all on its own.
This is precision. This is the future. And it’s just the beginning.
Ever wondered how astronauts prepare for the weightlessness of space? In Bordeaux, France, our astronauts train for microgravity using parabolic flights! These special flights create brief periods of zero gravity, mimicking the conditions of space.
By performing a series of steep climbs and descents, the plane allows astronauts to experience intense 2G forces before entering a 22-second weightless phase! This crucial training helps future astronauts adapt to moving, working, and even jumping in zero gravity.
Join us as we follow Rosemary Coogan, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, and John McFall on their parabolic flight training.
Credits: ESA – European Space Agency Footage: ESA/Novaspace
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
Have you ever wanted to design something that could fly around the Moon? This is your opportunity. The Artemis II astronauts will use a zero gravity indicator during their mission to demonstrate when their Orion spacecraft has reached microgravity. This plushie needs to be soft, small, and importantly, remind us of home.
The Moon Mascot contest challenges people of all ages from all over the world to submit a design to be made by NASA’s Thermal Blanket Lab and flown aboard Artemis II.
Air Zero G’s parabolic flights create a weightless environment by flying along a curved path called a parabola. This short period of weightlessness lasts about 22 seconds, during which people and experiments on board the parabolic flight can experience the same weightlessness as astronauts in orbit on the International Space Station.
The price to pay for this free-floating freedom is two short periods of hypergravity, during which everything weighs almost double for 20 seconds: first when the aircraft pulls up sharply and then again when it pulls out sharply afterwards to return to a normal flight path.
Each parabola takes about one minute to complete and is repeated 31 times in one flight, providing a total of about ten minutes of zero-gravity.
The flights provide European scientists with access to a repeatable, low-gravity research environment. Hundreds of experiments have flown over thousands of parabolas, enabling extensive scientific endeavours across many disciplines and resulting in a huge legacy of publications.
ESA’s parabolic flight project coordinator Neil Melville explains why 40 researchers working on 12 technologically-advanced experiments are put in an aircraft that flies at maximum thrust in repeated 50° angles at the limits of the Novespace aircraft’s design.
Parabolic flights offer sessions of 20 seconds of zero gravity giving a total of 10 minutes of weightlessness each flight. The advantage of parabolic flights over other platforms for experimentation in altered gravity is that researchers can join the flight and interact with their experiment – fine tuning hardware, running tests on human subjects or changing parameters on the fly. The experiments are carefully chosen for potential benefits, safety and uniqueness.
Neil highlights some of the experiments on ESA’s 72nd campaign that covered disciplines as diverse as astronomy, cooling techniques, metallurgy, weather and human physiology.
The Progra2 experiment is creating clouds of matter and recording how light is scattered by micrometre-sized particles. The carbon-based dust is chosen to resemble the clouds found in our Solar System such as around asteroids and comets. Knowing how light is scattered by these particles in microgravity will help interpret observations made from telescopes and increase our understanding the Universe.
An experiment from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium is looking at healing wounds with bio-mimetic materials by submitting them to mechanical stresses typical in weightlessness. The knowledge acquired will pave the way for the development of biophysical models and a have a direct impact on the industrial market of wearable electronics.
The VIP-GRAN team is looking into how particles behave in reduced gravity to understand the underlying physics in detail. On this flight they investigated the jamming of particles as they flow through small openings. This can be an annoyance on Earth when salt gets stuck in the shaker for example, but the phenomenon is influenced by gravity and the researchers want to know more. This was the ninth flight for the VIP-GRAN team and who are working towards having a version of their experiment fly on the International Space Station with even more weightless time.
Air Zero-G exterior footage courtesy of Airborne Films and Novespace.
★ Subscribe: http://bit.ly/ESAsubscribe and click twice on the bell button to receive our notifications.
We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out http://www.esa.int/ESA to get up to speed on everything space related.
Operated for ESA by the French company Novespace, the Zero-G aircraft flies parabolic arcs so that its passengers and cargo experience periods of freefalling weightlessness.
