| The Mars Society’s French chapter, announced recently that it had successfully conducted an artificial gravity test during a parabolic flight. |
Association Planète Mars (APM), the Mars Society’s French chapter, announced last week that it had successfully conducted an artificial gravity test during a parabolic flight. According to Richard Heidmann, APM chapter vice president, "We were able to demonstrate an artificial gravity system during a flight of a zero-gravity (zero-g) airplane from Novespace in the skies over Bourdeaux on October 9th."
A journey to Mars based on currently available propulsion technology would take at least nine months and would involve serious threats to passengers from both radiation and weightlessness. Without appropriate precautions any future Mars mission may deliver very sick explorers if these issues are not resolved.
The experiment had been proposed two years ago by APM to engineering students from Ecole Centrale de Lille. The project was sponsored by APM and CNES, the French space agency, which selected it as part of the framework of its annual student zero-g flight program.
Heidmann presented some of hte technical aspects of the artificial gravity system:
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The project design allowed the use of electric power rather than propellants to deploy the composite. A bearable initial rotation is given to the composite, which is then overstretched under the free action of centrifuge; then, a rather reduced supplemental impulsive rotation is given to the two linked mobiles; and finally an electric motor reduces the length of the tether until the desired g-level is obtained.
It was too complicated to represent the whole sequence, as we considered not realistic in the frame of this project to equip the mobiles with thrusters and attitude control. But the second part of the scenario, beginning with the start of retraction, seemed achievable. The main difficulty was to design a launching and releasing system which, while giving the good rotational speed, imparts as little as possible perturbations at release. Another problem was the quite reduced space allocated to the experiment in the plane, which put undesirable constraints on the dimensioning (this explains why the mobiles look over-sized with respect to their separation). But, nevertheless, it was still possible to have representative accelerations and to observe the dynamics of the process.
Releases were performed on 20 parabolas (for a total of 30), with movies captured from several different cameras (including from Novespace and APM) and acceleration measurements recorded aboard one of the mobiles. This data is presently under scrutiny by the students.
The idea of undertaking a small-scale demonstration of an artificial gravity system was originally proposed to the Mars Society by Tom Hill, a member of the organization’s Maryland chapter, under the title of the TEMPO3 mission. It was embraced by the Mars Society in 2008 as the winning entry in its “Mars Project Challenge” contest. Following work done by a team led by Mr. Hill in 2009, the project was adopted by APM in 2010.
SOURCE The Mars Society, Top Image - Tim Hornyak/CNET
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