THE AIRCRAFT PARABOLIC FLIGHT MICROGRAVITY PROGRAMME OF THE EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY
- Paper ID
94-iaf-169
- author
- company
Microgravity Projects Division, Manned Spaceflight and Microgravity Directorate European Space Research and Technology Centre, European Space Agency
- country
The Netherlands
- year
1994
- abstract
Aircraft parabolic flights provide repetitively up to 20 seconds of reduced gravity during ballistic flight manoeuvres. Parabolic flights are used to conduct short microgravity investigations in Physical and Life Sciences, to test instrumentation and to train astronauts before a spaceflight. Being the only earth based facility for investigations on human subjects in a real weightless environment, their use is complementary to earth based investigations in simulated weightlessness such as bed rest and immersion, and preparatory to manned space missions. The European Space Agency (ESA) has organized since 1984 twenty parabolic flight campaigns using three different aircrafts. More than 1700 parabolas were flown in total, representing nine and half hours of microgravity in slices of 20 s, or equivalently six low Earth orbits ; 235 experiments were performed, including experiments in Human Physiology, Biology and Life Science Technology. This paper presents the aircraft parabolic flight programme with respect to other microgravity providing carriers. A survey of the Life Science and Technology experiments performed on and by human subjects since ten years summarizes the research work conducted with this unique microgravity tool.