New research has implications for crew safety in space and could potentially give clues to how aging affects people’s balance systems here on Earth.
“It has been repeatedly shown that the perception of gravity influences perceptual skill,” said York University’s Professor Laurence Harris, senior author of the study.
“The most profound way of looking at the influence of gravity is to take it away, which is why we took our research into space.”
“We’ve had a steady presence for close to a quarter century in space and with space efforts only increasing as we plan to go back to the moon and beyond, answering health-and-safety questions only becomes more important.”
“Based on our findings it seems as though humans are surprisingly able to compensate adequately for the lack of an Earth-normal environment using vision.
In the research, Professor Harris and colleagues studied a dozen astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits about 400 km from the Earth’s surface.
“Here, Earth’s gravity is approximately cancelled out by centrifugal force generated by the orbiting of the station. In the resulting microgravity, the way people move is more like flying,” Professor Harris said.
“People have previously anecdotally reported that they felt they were moving faster or further than they really were in space, so this provided some motivation to actually record this.”
The authors compared the performance of a dozen astronauts — six men and six women — before, during, and after their year-long missions to the space station and found that their sense of how far they traveled remained largely intact.
Space missions are busy endeavors and it took the researchers several days to connect with the astronauts once they arrived at the space station.
“It’s possible our research was unable to capture early adaptation that may have occurred in those first few days. It’s still a good news message because it says that…
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