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News  ESA’s new astronauts have a taste of zero gravity
ESA's new astronaut candidates enjoyed a taste of space last Friday during a special aircraft flight in Bordeaux, France. A modified Airbus A300 offered a glimpse of their future working conditions, as well as providing microgravity for science experiments. Planes flying a special parabolic path can simulate weightlessness for research and astronaut training. Up to 22 seconds of microgravity can be created at a time and, by repeating the manoeuvre, total weightlessness during one flight can be as much as 12 minutes.
The 'Zero-G' Airbus A300 is the biggest and most advanced plane in the world for these flights. This faithful workhorse has flown ESA’s 52nd parabolic flight campaign during recent weeks, offering weightlessness not only to scientists but also to Europe’s new astronaut candidates.
Samantha Cristoforetti, Alexander Gerst, Andreas Mogensen, Luca Parmitano, Timothy Peake and Thomas Pesquet have been in astronaut training since last autumn, but this was their first experience with zero gravity.
The first lesson was to see Newton’s laws in action. They moved heavy containers around and threw them to each other to feel how mass and weight are not the same. They saw how an object continues on its path until an external force is applied. And just a small push can propel a box to the other side of the cabin.
Finally, the new recruits performed typical spacewalk jobs: attaching their feet in special boots to a platform and rotating their bodies through quarter and half turns using handrails like those outside the International Space Station. In weightlessness, this is all more difficult than it sounds.
"We wanted them to feel the differences between the conditions in real weightlessness and inside the Neutral Buoyancy Facility of EAC. It was also important to get accustomed to the feeling of unusual body orientation."
Since space research is an important job for astronauts, the candidates took part in some of the investigations on the aircraft.
One called for lying down during the microgravity and hypergravity periods to look at the human body’s ability to adapt to gravity changes. They also participated in 'psychomotoric' experiments, dealing with manipulation and movements in zero gravity.
"In addition to the training programme, they also had fun and enjoyed every second of the zero gravity!"
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