Acceleration profiles and processing methods for parabolic flight
Name
s41526-018-0050-3.pdf
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921.26 KB
Format
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Ruvkun, Gary
Bryan, Noelle C.
Saboda, Kendall Nicole
Bhattaru, Srinivasa Aditya
Zuber, Maria
Carr, Christopher E.
Date Issued
August 2018
Journal
npj Microgravity
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Citation
Carr, Christopher E., et al. “Acceleration Profiles and Processing Methods for Parabolic Flight.” Npj Microgravity, vol. 4, no. 1, Dec. 2018. © 2018 The Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Parabolic flights provide cost-effective, time-limited access to “weightless” or reduced gravity conditions, facilitating research and validation activities that complement infrequent and costly access to space. Although parabolic flights have been conducted for decades, reference acceleration profiles and processing methods are not widely available. Here we present a solution for collecting, analyzing, and classifying the altered gravity environments experienced during parabolic flights, which we validated during a Boeing 727-200F flight with 20 parabolas. All data and analysis code are freely available. Our solution can be integrated with diverse experimental designs, does not depend upon accelerometer orientation, and allows unsupervised classification of all phases of flight, providing a consistent and open-source approach to quantifying gravito-inertial accelerations (GIA), or g levels. As academic, governmental, and commercial use of space advances, data availability and validated processing methods will enable better planning, execution, and analysis of parabolic flight experiments, and thus facilitate future space activities.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41526-018-0050-3
