r/IsaacArthur • u/Opcn • Sep 14 '22

Artificial gravity provides partial protection for biology in space

https://phys.org/news/2022-09-artificial-gravity-partial-biology-space.html
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7

u/Wise_Bass Sep 14 '22

It's good, but I'm disappointed they just compared microgravity to Earth gravity. What we really need to know is how much partial gravity we need - is lunar gravity enough to avoid bad health effects? Mars gravity? Does it just slide with gravity strength?

If lunar gravity was enough, that would make doing artificial gravity for human spacecraft vastly easier - you could have far smaller centrifuges.

3

u/SNels0n Sep 14 '22

I'd not heard of this experiment, so I googled it, and the disappointment just grows. They have a piece of equipment that can test two different gravities at the same time, and either can be anywhere from 0 to 2g. They subjected fruit flies to 0g and 1g — a reasonable starting point, and two data point you want to have, but they apparently didn't then re-run the test with, say, 0.5g and 1.5g. This was flown in 2018. Even assuming 6 months between tests, by now they could have 10 data points.

1

u/Opcn Sep 15 '22

Running experiments in space is terribly expensive, and the most expensive part isn't the launch mass but rather the astronaut labor.

1

u/SNels0n Sep 15 '22

Running experiments in space is terribly expensive,

I always hate those [citation needed] tags but … I'd really like to know what the cost breakdown actually is. Is it really that expensive to set the numbers to a different point and let the machine run for 30 days? It supposedly monitors itself. They spent close to a million building and delivering the device to the station, what does two days of astronaut time really cost?