Developed by researchers at Florida State University, the new design for a magnetic levitation-based low-gravity simulator can create an area of low gravity with a volume about 1,000 times larger than existing simulators of the same type.
“Low gravity has a profound effect on the behaviours of biological systems and also affects many physical processes from the dynamics and heat transfer of fluids to the growth and self-organisation of materials,” said Wei Guo, associate professor and lead scientist on the study.
“However, spaceflight experiments are often limited by the high cost and the small payload size and mass. Therefore, developing ground-based low-gravity simulators is important.”
Existing simulators, such as drop towers and parabolic aircraft, use free fall to generate near-zero gravity. But these facilities typically have short low-gravity durations of up to a few minutes at most which makes them unsuitable for experiments that require long...