The facility can provide a microgravity test environment for a fraction of the cost conducting an experiment in space and provides the best gravity levels of any of nasa s ground based low gravity facilities.
Nasa gravity free room.
This is accomplished by allowing the experiment vehicle to free fall in a vacuum a distance of 432 feet 132 m.
Gravity also gets weaker with distance.
The zero gravity facility is nasa s premier facility for conducting ground based microgravity research.
See our zero g which puts test payloads into a free fall for 5 seconds dropping over 400 feet.
The question is how does nasa achieve this.
It is the gravity in space that keeps neptune rotating around the sun and what keeps the sun glued to our galaxy.
Anything that has mass also has gravity.
Earth s gravity comes from all its mass.
So the closer objects are to each other the stronger their gravitational pull is.
If gravity was nonexistent in space the moon some 400000 km away wouldn t revolve around us constantly.
All its mass makes a combined gravitational pull on all the mass in your body.
Watch the visualization for a tour of earth s gravity field.
Explore nasa s drop zone zero gravity research facility nasa.
Since 2002 nasa s twin grace satellites have mapped earth s gravity the attractive force exerted by its mass enabling scientists to see these differences and monitor how they change over time.