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Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Sam Connolly answered on 18 Jun 2014:
Making artificial gravity in space is pretty easy, so we can do that already – all you need if for your space station to be built as a circle, with the floor on the inside of the outer edge. Then you spin it around! In the same way water guys pushed towards the bottom of a bucket if you swing it in a circle, the people and everything else inside get pushed towards the floor, in the same way as gravity. That’s why space stations are often circular in films. No one has actually built a space station like that yet though, because it would need to be quite big and even the international space station is a bit too small! I’m sure it’ll happen in the near future though.
Planets and the moon all have their own gravity already, so it’s less necessary to have artificial gravity, but it’s true that it would be easier to do things if the gravity is still low, like on the moon for example. In the case you’d need a more complicated way of doing it. I’m sure there will be a way at some point, but at the moment there isn’t really!
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Sarah Casewell answered on 18 Jun 2014:
As Sam said, we can use centrifugal force to create artificial gravity – you’ve probably felt it at some point when on a fast roller coaster and you go round bends – you get thrown outwards!
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Nate Bastian answered on 18 Jun 2014:
Another way is to have magnetic boots that would hold you to the surface. That’s not quite artificial gravity, but helps you stay on the “ground”.
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Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:
I think Sam has pretty much covered this one; it’s “easy” to achieve given the right engineering in Space so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the first astronauts to walk on other planets.
Of course, there are other issues for the astronauts wanting to walk on another planet that need to be addressed alongside gravity; temperature (Mercury and Venus are VERY hot!), radiation, toxic gases in the atmosphere and/or acid rain (Venus rains acid and has a thick atmosphere with lots of carbon dioxide!)…
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Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:
It’s very easy to create artificial gravity — you do it every day when you take a lift and you go up: when the lift accelerates at the beginning, you get pushed towards the floor a little bit and that’s artificial gravity!
There is a very deep principle in physics known as Principle of Equivalence, that says that the artificial gravity that you get out of the lift accelerating upwards (or a rocket, or a space station) is the same as the gravity that is produced by the mass of a planet. So that’s handy!
You could use this trick to create artificial gravity on a rocket, but not on another planets or on another moon – because you’d have to accelerate the moon or planet around, and that would be very hard to do!
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