How did the NASA's aeroplane manuoeuvre to simulate the NO GRAVITY environment for training astronauts ?

Question

As seen from TV news, the scientists had to familiarize their movements in the outer space by being trained in the simulated flight. The question is HOW the flight had to be acrobatically operated in order to create the circumstance of no gravity for them.

Answer 1

If you throw a ball across the room, it will stop accelerating as it leaves your hand.

The whole ball (including anything inside it) will carry on travelling according to the force you applied, but its direction will be altered by gravity (which is still pulling it downwards).

The shape it's flight makes is called a 'parabola', and this same shape happens whenever gravity stops an object from travelling upwards (even a purely vertical thrust will lead to some sideways movement; this is called 'Coriolis effect'), and makes it travel downwards instead.

Because the outside of the object is always travelling in the same direction as the objects inside it, they don't press on each other (their relative 'G' is zero). Because 'weight' is actually just relative pressure, the objects will seem weightless.

The American and Soviet 'vomit comets' are large transport aeroplanes with strengthened wing roots and a padded interior.

The pilot will first initiate a steep dive, and pull up out of this as if he is going to 'loop the loop'. Pulling up from a dive like this will press the passengers against the floor, so they seem heavier than normal; typically 3-4 times their normal weight (3-4G).

As the plane comes up from the dive, this extra 'G' will decrease, until it reaches zero, and the passengers feel 'weightless'.

At that point, the aeroplane is travelling upwards under the momentum of its own weight, like a roller coaster. If the pilot kept the engines accelerating, they would drive the plane upwards and press against the passengers, but by cutting the engines, the plane is left to rise like a thrown ball. It travels in a parabolic curve, but the passengers don't (they tend to bounce around in zigzags, perform somersaults for the camera, lose their sense of direction and start puking)

About 40 seconds of weightlessness can be simulated in this way, because that's how long it takes for the plane to stop rising, and return to its downward dive speed. If it was left to dive for too long, pulling out of the dive would rip the wings off.

(if that happened, the passengers would experience weightlessness (or very nearly; air resistance would slow the plane, but not them) all the way to the ground, but they wouldn't be able to tell us about it afterwards)

Answer 2

An anti gravity room could be created in an airplane which flies in a parabolic trend. surely, the airplane flies up and then dips down. it is an identical feeling you get on the top of a curler coaster, however the flight trend is super adequate so as that the 0 gravity could be felt for 30 seconds. NASA does this and the airplane is affectionately called the vomit comet. Gravity could be mimicked in area via rotating the spaceship at this form of velocity that the centrifugal forces felt via the astronauts are comparable to gravity in the international. it extremely is resembling the spinning experience on the leisure park the place the floor drops out and additionally you're caught to the wall by way of fact the experience spins. the version being that instead of being caught to the wall, you in elementary terms sense a tension it extremely is resembling earth gravity and additionally you could stroll around. i'm no longer conscious that it extremely is surely getting used in prepare, yet. wish this enables.

Answer 3

I believe that the aircraft is set automatically into a special flight path called a ballistic trajectory. This has the effect of the unrestrained passengers and objects inside falling at the same rate as the plane and simulating weightlessness. A bit like when you loop at the fairground on the roller-coaster

I think the geometrical name of this special flight path is a parabola

Answer 4

They basically fly to a high altitude in a specially adapted (interior removed) passenger plane, then let it fall out of the sky in a steep dive. Before crashing, they pull up and re-climb to high altitude before doing it again. The weightlessness only lasts for a short while, but zero g is reproduced to give trainee astronauts a feeling of what to expect.

Answer 5

I don't suppose that they still use the same system, but for the early flights , the pilot had a tennis ball on a piece of string hanging inside the cockpit, when he started the parabola the ball would rise and he had to keep it just floating to achieve zero G.

Answer 6

A series of steep dives & then steep climbs

Answer 7

I believe its water, under water you get the same sensations as space.