Weightlessness Ryan Ash

What is weightlessness! Weightlessness occurs when a body is: falling freely; in orbit, in outer space or in an airplane following a particular parabolic flight path. This presentation will focus mainly on the last one.

Weightlessness in orbit Whilst an object is in orbit, for instance a shuttle, the crew will feel zero gravity. This is because although yes they are traveling around the earth they are also accelerating towards it because of circular motion. The shuttle is accelerating towards the earth with an acceleration of G therefore achieving weightlessness.

Circular motion Circular motion is as simple as it sounds, an object moving in a circle. Now because Velocity is a vector quantity when an object is moving with circular motion its velocity is always changing. It’s this change in velocity that gives us the centripetal acceleration that occurs with circular motion. The centripetal acceleration varies with the radius r of the circle and speed v of the object, becoming larger for greater speed and smaller radius. More precisely, the centripetal acceleration is given by where ω = v / r is the magnitude of angular velocity. The negative sign indicates that the direction of this acceleration is towards the centre of the circle

Vomit Comet Vomit Comet is a nickname for any airplane that briefly provides a nearly weightless environment in which to train astronauts, conduct research, and film motion pictures. The airplane produces weightlessness by following a parabolic vertical flight path. A parabolic flight path is the same path that would be taken by an object in free fall, such as a cannonball fired into the air. As a result, the aircraft does not exert any G force on its contents, so the contents have zero apparent weight relative to the aircraft.

Flight path This is the approximate the path needed to be taken by pilots to achieve weightlessness.