A spaceship which uses centripetal rotation to create artificial gravity.
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Must it always be accelerating? (The rate of rotation for it to work?)
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If no, and even if yes, if one were to place themselves right at the center of this spinning structure, would one feel no gravity?
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If one were to be moving from a part of the ship with no centripetal rotation and thus 0 gravity to the part with it what would the experience be like transitioning? Would one technically be able to just fly over the entire rotating thing? If you never touched it in the first place?
Image:
(Sorry for the poor drawing :(, I should mention that the opening is connected just to the edge of the spinning living section so that this window is almost perfectly centered around this spinning living space) If you think of this living space as a circle he is in the center (the door).
Description: Person coming from the 0-gravity part of the ship about to enter the centripetal rotation large living space. But doing so from a high point… Would they be Superman?
Best Answer
If you were in a zero-gravity environment (e.g., in earth orbit or in a coasting trajectory en route to Mars), alone in your space suit, you would feel no gravity.
If a big pipe were placed around you in your zero-g environment, you would still feel no gravity. The pipe would have no effect on you at all.
If the pipe were spun with you inside it but not in contact with it, you would still feel no gravity, because you and the pipe would not be interacting. It makes no difference whether the pipe's spin rate is steady or accelerating.
However, if you moved to the spinning pipe's inside surface and grabbed hold of it, you would feel yourself first yanked by whatever you were hanging onto (because after all it is moving relative to you), and then you would feel yourself being pressed against the inside surface of the pipe. This is for the same reason that a rock swinging around in a circle on the end of a string makes the string taut: centripetal force exerted on the rock by the string tension causes the rock to move in a circle instead of fly off at a tangent.
From the above you can see the answer to the third part of your question: If you are floating in zero-g and enter a spinning chamber, you are not attracted to the walls of the chamber. To someone pinned to the wall by centripetal force, watching you enter the chamber, you will a) seem to be rotating, and b) float like Superman.