The Airbus 300 Zero G looks like any other airplane-except that it can simulate zero gravity. On a flight to Bordeaux, France this week, researchers from York University conducted a number of tests in order to better understand how people perceive the idea of “up.” The research will inform the interior design of the International Space Station and future modules.
“It’s an aircraft that can undergo periods of microgravity,” said Michael Jenkin, a professor at York’s faculty of science and engineering. “That is, periods where the plane is on a parabolic arc such that the net acceleration on people inside is zero or close to zero.”
Like going over a bump in a car, the plane is designed to suspend everything and everyone inside it when it plummets. With a 10,000-foot change in altitude, the suspension lasts 22 seconds rather than the milliseconds in a car or a roller coaster. At those moments, objects inside the plane get close to experiencing zero gravity as astronauts in space would, termed “microgravity.”
“The aircraft holds a large number of experiments at once,” explained Jenkin. Most of these, like a 10-minute zero-gravity surgery performed last week, are conducted within those 22-second intervals for the purposes of bettering emergency procedures inside the International Space Station and designing more efficient stations in the future.
For the York group, experiments were designed to understand what happens when astronauts are struck with “visual re-orientation allusions,” or the loss of the sense of “up.”
“On earth, everything tells you about up,” said Jenkin. “Gravity tells you which way down is and everything opposite is up. What happens in outer space is that a lot of those cues get lost.”
The result is nausea, motion sickness, and disorientation when astronauts enter a module the wrong way up. This disorientation isn’t life threatening itself, but under emergency conditions, astronauts without a sense of direction may not be exit the module correctly.
“The current set of module rules are not as well thought-out as they might be,” said Jenkin. “One of the things we’re looking at is informing the next generation of rules…the Martha Stewart guide to international space stations.”
By adding more visual cues on board the space station, possibly through interior design, Jenkin’s research hopes to prevent moments of disorientation for more efficient emergency procedures and better health for astronauts.
The experiments also tested equipment nearly identical to that available on the space station in preparation for the experiments on board planned for next year.
Testing equipment and a human’s ability to carry out complex procedures in a microgravity environment is important if permanent habitations in space are to become a priority.
