If you watched 2001: Space Odyssey, you need to remember that scene where astronauts run on a giant wheel to practice and receive the daily dose of gravity. This wheel acts as a centrifuge, which simulates the force of gravity . Without gravity, the bones lose strength, the muscles become ...
If you watched 2001: Space Odyssey, you need to remember that scene where astronauts run on a giant wheel to practice and receive the daily dose of gravity. This wheel acts as a centrifuge, which simulates the force of gravity . Without gravity, the bones lose strength, the muscles become rickets, and the heart loses its conditioning. When astronauts return from long missions from the International Space Station, they are warned not to move after landing; they are loaded and then go through several weeks of reconditioning to gravity.
This means that even if we had the spacecraft ready to travel for years and years in space, astronauts could not bear to spend all this time without gravity. Gravity chambers are critical for long space travel. But so far we have not been able to create any room that does not cause dizziness and nausea in its users.
The problem with the wheels generating forces on the bodies is that all this movement creates a paired cross-vision, a hassle in the inner ear that makes you feel like you're somersaulting, and this causes nausea.
Slow ignition
To try to solve this problem, aerospace engineer Torin Clark conducted a rather funny experiment: he and his team put several volunteers to run on one of these centrifugal machines. The difference between this study and all the previous ones is that they started with rotations very slowly and progressed at different speeds, depending on the adaptation of each person. The advance has been customized.
Each participant started with only one spin per minute and increased the speed only when he stopped feeling sick. Gradual acceleration did not happen quickly: they were acclimatized in 10 different sessions.
This personalized advancement brought positive results for all participants. At the end of the tenth session, everyone rotated comfortably without feeling sick with an average of 17 revolutions per minute. This number is much higher than that obtained in any previous experiment.
The results were published in the June issue of the Journal of Vestibular Research . The research was conducted at the University of Colorado in Boulder (USA).
This shows that artificial gravity can be an optimistic option for the future of space travel. “As far as we know, virtually anyone can adapt to this stimulus,” says the researcher.
50 sessions
In a similar study, the researchers increased the number of training sessions to 50 and concluded that people also adapt to multiple rotations per minute.
Now they want to know how long the benefits of training last after the interruption of Sessions, and how much gravity an astronaut needs to fight the loss of bones and muscles.
