There are fundamental physical difficulties as well as program management issues. Medical requirements for the iss astronauts include monthly body mass measurements.
Weightlessness Wikipedia
Space body mass measurement. New mass measurement systems with the current sensor technologies should be prepared and the new sensor system could be expanded for drop tower in space. Nasa has a research device on the iss. Instead the subjects mass is measured using this special chair. Using slammd astronauts can accurately measure body mass with the help of newtons second law of motion fma force is equal to mass times acceleration. Prior to the skylab mission it was observed that both us and russian astronauts returning from space had lost weight and nasa worried whether this implied some physical deterioration which could grow worse on longer flights. For a low earth orbit space flight environment body mass has to be measured in some way in weightlessness.
As conditions in orbit are without gravity body weight can not be measured. Astronaut tamara jernigan being weighed in space. As the chair moves back and forth a timer records how much the crewmembers mass retards the chairs movement. Although inception of the measurement of astronaut body mass measurement was as old as skylab era progress in the field has not been as expected. Ance which was designed for measuring the body mass of astronauts is proposed as the 窶倪牢pace scale窶吮 in the space scale a linear ball bearing is also used to connect the target object and the reference mass and the mass of the object is. The russian built body mass measurement device bmmd is onboard the international space station iss for the purpose.
Thats where slammd comes in. One measurement to check the physical condition of the astronauts is to weight them but in space you cant simply stand on the weighing scales like we do on earth. Mass measurements aboard skylab were part of the medical experiments conducted there.
Gallery of Space Body Mass Measurement
