H
holmec
Guest
From the recent article<br />http://www.space.com/news/060803_griffin_mars.html<br /><br />Griffin notes he would make a study to figure out how to get to Mars. <br /><br />I have one suggestion. In making a "ship" (CEV and other modules) that travels from earth to mars and back with the crew, make the "ship" in such a way that while you cruise the "ship" turns on an axis to have artificial gravity (ie centrifical force) so the crew will keep their bone mass.<br /><br />You can design it in many ways, but I think the operational goals to use artificial gravity while cruising and not while docking operations and maintenace operations would be simple enough to not need motors to spin only parts of the craft. Spin the whole craft. <br /><br />For instance, if you design the modules in a classical cylindrical or linear fashion (like we have been doing [Apollo, Soyuz, Shenzou] all you need to do is design the module with a floor on one side and then have a counter weight extend from the middle of the linear configuration and spin the whole thing. If you do it right the interior of the modules will have a floor that the astonauts can walk on. <br /><br />The only other thing is to adapt the camera views for the spin. for forward and rear views you can make a viewer on a pc or laptop spin the piture at the appropiate rate, and for lateral views you can use stop action type of algorithym to see clearly.<br /><br />To me this seems to be an elegant solution to the complicated problem of bone loss of astronauts during long missions. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#0000ff"><em>"SCE to AUX" - John Aaron, curiosity pays off</em></font></p> </div>