MOVEMENT IN DEEP SPACE
What connects astronauts in orbit, divers at sea depths and vertical dancers on some vertical surface of a rock or wall? How does the long stay of people in orbital station and walking on the surface of the moon look and feel like? What happens to human being on a spacewalk outside a spacecraft?
In 1967, at NASA Langley Research Center, astronauts were introduced to Walking Simulator that served as physical training programme in their preparation for reduced gravity environment which they would encounter when launching on the surface of the Moon. The body of an astronaut is placed vertically to the vertical surface and suspended in the air with the head, chest, hips and lower legs attached to cables that are hanging from the ceiling. This Walking Simulator is the pioneering method for all nowadays vertical dance trainings methods and techniques.
In weightlessness, we are effortlessly floating, because all of the acceleration forces on us add to zero. There is no up or down in weightlessness. Perhaps diving is the closest experience to this. Because we feel so light, we can move about with the slightest amount of effort. Pushing off a surface too hard results in swinging around like a Ping-Pong ball.
These are the main issues that will be discussed during this lecture with plenty of photographs and videos with interesting and spectacular moments in Deep Space.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Ante Radonić, born in Korčula, won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Croatian Technical
Culture Community in 2014. For over forty years he worked as a planetary director with the
astronautics department at the Technical Museum "Nikola Tesla" in Zagreb. He has published three
hundred popular scientific articles in journals, weeklies and dailies (ABC Culture, Man and Space,
Lexicon, General Encyclopaedia of the Lexicographic Institute "Miroslav Krleža", book "A Look at the
Space Ocean" published by the Observatory of the Croatian Ethnological Society).
Since 1997, he has been a regular expert contributor to the Andromeda weekly program dedicated to
space exploration on the Second Program of Croatian Radio on Tuesdays from 8pm to 10pm. He has held
more than 500 public lectures in the field of astronomy, astronautics and rocketry across
Croatia.
