Kavli Affiliate: Maria T. Zuber
| Summary:
Parabolic flights provide cost-effective, time-limited access to "weightless" or reduced gravity conditions experienced in space or on planetary surfaces, e.g. the Moon or Mars. These flights facilitate fundamental research – from materials science to space biology – and testing/validation activities that support and complement infrequent and costly access to space. While parabolic flights have been conducted for decades, reference acceleration profiles and processing methods are not widely available – yet are critical for assessing the results of these activities. Here we present a method for collecting, analyzing, and classifying the altered gravity environments experienced during a parabolic flight. We validated this method using a commercially available accelerometer during a Boeing 727-200F flight with $20$ parabolas. All data and analysis code are freely available. Our solution can be easily integrated with a variety of experimental designs, does not depend upon accelerometer orientation, and allows for unsupervised and repeatable classification of all phases of flight, providing a consistent and open-source approach to quantifying gravito-intertial accelerations (GIA), or $g$ levels. As academic, governmental, and commercial use of space increases, data availability and validated processing methods will enable better planning, execution, and analysis of parabolic flight experiments, and thus, facilitate future space activities.
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