It is an occupational hazard of an astronomer to be asked about the supposed catastrophe(s) in the year 2012. Usually people want to know about the effects of the alignment of the planets in that year. Sometimes, prompted by the movie 2012, they mention neutrinos. Even if they don’t think the world will end, they are surprised when I tell them that there is no planetary alignment in 2012, and uncomprehending when I point out that it would not make a bit of difference if there were.

Here is a movie of where the 8 major planets are from 2000 through 2050 (click the link to open and play the movie; use the controls to scroll through and pause on any year, displayed at lower left).
Motion of the Planets from 2000 to 2050
Notice how closely spaced the four inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are compared to the outer four. Notice also the frenetic pace of the inner planets. Clearly it’s not too rare for Earth and its terrestrial neighbors to be roughly lined up simply because they are all orbiting the Sun relatively quickly. And just as clearly, with its 165-year orbital period, Neptune (the triangle on the right side of the movie) is not very frequently in line with the rest of the planets. There is a much more impressive alignment of the planets, in fact, in 2010 than in 2012.

And just what are the implications of a planetary alignment? For the outer planets, it means skygazers will have a nice view of several planets each night, as they will all be up in the night sky at about the same time. That’s about it. If we tally up the ways planets could interact with us here on Earth, we come to a pretty short list:
- they reflect sunlight toward the Earth
- they have a gravitational effect on the Earth
Their magnetic fields do not extend to the Earth which is, anyway, enclosed in its own relatively strong magnetic field. The amount of sunlight coming to us from the planets is obviously puny and generally less than many stars.

For their gravitational influence, we can do a simple comparison. The gravitational acceleration exerted by an object on you or me is proportional to the mass of that object divided by the square of the distance between you or me and that object. So, for Jupiter, the most massive (and relatively nearby) planet, the gravitational acceleration you feel due to Jupiter’s presence is proportional to Jupiter’s mass (1.9 times 10^27 kg) divided by 3.9 times 10^25 meters squared. That gives us 48 in our units (where we are not worrying about the universal constant of gravitation since it will drop out when we make our comparison). Let’s compare that to, say, the acceleration you feel due to the gravitational influence of your spouse. If your spouse or significant other is a rather svelte 110 pounds (50 kg) and is sleeping 1 meter away from, then the gravitational acceleration you feel from that person is 50 divided by 1 squared, or 50, roughly the same value as the entire planet Jupiter. To pick a more dramatic example, when you stand next to your car, it is exerting a far greater influence on you (about 40 times greater) than all of the planets in the solar system. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?

The two astronomical objects that do produce a noticeable gravitational effect down here on the surface of the Earth are, not surprisingly, the Moon and the Sun. And when they line up it does have a measurable impact: the so-called “spring tides” or “full Moon tide” and “new Moon tide”. The gentle rising of the ocean up the beach every six hours or so is due to the tidal force of the Moon, and tides are simply due to the difference in the Moon’s gravitational pull across the body of the Earth. The Sun, although more massive, has a somewhat smaller effect on tides than the Moon because it is so much further away. But when the Sun and Moon are aligned (at full Moon and new Moon), their tidal effects combine and ocean tides are higher than usual. In the units we computed gravitational acceleration above, where Jupiter and the person standing next to you both rate about a 50, the Moon’s effect is about 460,000 and the Sun’s is 9 billion. The Earth does go around the Sun after all. (Tidal force depends on the derivative of gravity and so gets weaker with distance faster than gravity, hence the weaker tidal influence of the Sun than the Moon.)

So catastrophes in 2012 are likely to be restricted to homebound, terrestrial causes (hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, famine, drought, floods, and elections). The only sky-based catastrophe possible would be the impact of a comet. A catastrophic asteroid impact in 2012 is unlikely because we have much better advance warning for asteroids than for comets due to the shapes of their orbits (comets can sneak in from the outer solar system, while we have observed most dangerous asteroids).

Day 2 was all about the Phoenix centrifuge at NASTAR. After some instruction on techniques to increase blood pressure to avoid loss of vision and black out, we did a series of four flights in the morning. Because the centrifuge only accommodates one person at a time, and because there were a dozen of us, it took a while for everyone to get a ride. I was fifth to go. The four flights consisted of brief profiles of sustained acceleration along either the body’s plus X axis (into the chest) or the plus Z axis (down the spine). The latter pose problems for consciousness because +Gz makes it harder for the heart to pump blood to the brain. The Gx flights make it difficult to breathe, but are not generally likely to make one pass out, at least for the durations we were doing (about 20 seconds at a time).

I have previously had experience with two G’s on parabolic airplane flights. The first time I flew one of those flights, I oriented my body so that the two G’s were in the +z direction, and I got very sick after about a half dozen parabolas. On subsequent flights I lay flat on the floor of the plane, making those G’s in the +x direction and therefore much easier to bear. So I was concerned about our 2 Gz and 3.5 Gz flights, though they wouldn’t have the repetition of the “vomit comet” nor would they be interspersed with 0 G parabolas. On the 3.5 Gz flight I had to apply all of the body-tensing countermeasures we used because I started to get a bit of tunnel vision. The countermeasures worked. The Gx flights, at 3 and 6 G’s, were impressive. The sensation of going up very very fast was completely convincing. At 6 Gx it was a real effort to breathe, and speech was very difficult. All in all, the flights were smooth and didn’t make me sick.

In the afternoon we did two flights simulating the acceleration profile of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. One was at 50% of the total acceleration, and the other was full acceleration. These profiles involved both Gx and Gz at the same time, along with a visual simulation of what we would see through the window of the spaceship. These flights really gave the impression of going somewhere FAST. On the final run, I had to apply countermeasures to keep my vision as things started to go gray during the 3.8 Gz portion of the rocket burn. The peak accelerations are actually on re-entry, but they are Gx and so are easier to deal with.

Today we got a tour of the NASTAR center which has some impressive aircraft simulators and a gigantic centrifuge (11 ton, 25-foot arm, with bolts going 45 feet down into the bedrock and a huge mass of concrete underneath to keep it stable as it swings around). Then we had a course on the physiology of hypoxia (oxygen deprivation) and some basics on atmospheric physics before getting fitted with oxygen masks and heading for the altitude chamber. I’m not actually sure that’s the write term, but it’s a room with a dozen seats and ports for oxygen masks and can have its pressure adjusted to simulate various altitudes.

After 30 minutes of denitrogenation (breathing pure oxygen to remove nitrogen bubbles from the blood to reduce the likelihood of those bubbles expanding to painful size on ascent to high altitudes), we took our masks off and they took the chamber up to 18,000 feet. That is to say, they lowered the pressure in the room to what it is at an altitude of 18,000 feet. At that altitude, the pressure is about half what it is at sea level. So each breath delivers half the oxygen of a breath at sea level. We had some simple exercises to perform – simple math operations, some writing – to identify any degradation in mental function as we entered a hypoxic state. I noticed an increased heart rate, but no other symptoms. I have done two altitude “flights” in the past, about 10 years ago, with no noticeable effects. I could not tell if the increased heart rate was due to lack of oxygen or simple anxiety about possibly worse effects. After about 15 minutes, one member of our group passed out. By that time I was feeling a bit tired, but otherwise no overt effects of hypoxia. My simple math problems were done without error, as were the two mazes.

Today I flew to Philadelphia with my graduate student, Akbar Whizin, in preparation for a two-day course on suborbital spaceflight at the NASTAR center. With at least two companies readying commercial suborbital rockets to carry paying passengers to the lower limits of outer space, there is increased interest in the uses of these vehicles for science and education and not just high-priced sightseeing. NASA has long had a vigorous program of experimentation in suborbital sounding rockets. These new vehicles may soon find a place as laboratories for scientists and students who need quick and easy access to either the upper reaches of the atmosphere or a few precious minutes of high quality microgravity.

My own scientific interest in these vehicles lies in the study of the collisional behavior of small objects and aggregates of objects at low impact speeds. I’ve had one such experiment fly twice on the space shuttle and a similar experiment has flown several times on parabolic airplane flights. These experiments simulate in various ways the collisions that were common in the early stages of the formation of the solar system and are currently taking place in Saturn’s rings (and the rings of the other planets). It is not possible to perform experiments on these kinds of collisions without a microgravity environment. A few seconds of microgravity can be achieved in a drop tower, and 10-15 seconds of a relatively uneven low-gravity environment can be obtained on parabolic airplane flights. For many experiments a longer, more stable microgravity environment is needed.

Virgin Galactic has unveiled the first of its passenger-carrying suborbital crafts, the VSS Enterprise. Blue Origin has selected my experiment and two others to fly on a test flight of their New Shepard suborbital rocket. Other companies are developing rockets for passengers and some just for payloads. Someday soon, scientists may be flying alongside their experiments on these rockets, reacting to the performance and making real time adjustments to the operation of the experiment. And so I find myself getting ready to undergo two days of “astronaut boot camp” at the NASTAR center. Tomorrow features some hypoxia training and time in a chamber simulating high altitudes (low atmospheric pressure). Wednesday will be a full simulation of a flight on the VSS Enterprise. The final frontier awaits.

I’ve had the mixed pleasure of spending a fair amount of time experiencing what is usually called “weightlessness”. I say it is a mixed pleasure because while the sensation of weightlessness is amazing and so different from our everyday experience of the world, I have experienced it on parabolic airplane flights which have the unhappy side effect in a segment of the population of inducing nausea and vomiting. I am in that unlucky segment. The body does adapt, and my last flight was puke-free. Other names used to describe the state of weightlessness are zero-g, no gravity, microgravity, and freefall. The latter is the only one that is truly accurate.

As an astronomer, gravity is the force that most concerns me professionally, and it is also the force that most of us have the most direct intuitive relationship with in our daily lives. And yet the relationship between gravity and freefall or “weightlessness” seems to be as elusive to most people as the sensation itself. Whether I am lecturing to a university astronomy class, speaking to a group of elementary school kids, or giving a public lecture to educated professionals, I always try to demonstrate the amazing insight of Isaac Newton about gravity: the same force that makes the Moon orbit the Earth is responsible for apples falling to the ground. While it is easy to understand those words, their implications for how the solar system works and for “weightlessness” usually remain abstract or obscure. Working against us is not just our daily experience (and, one could reasonably argue, millions of years of evolution), but also the language we use to describe gravity and its presumed absence.

Here is my standard gravity stump speech. For these purposes we do not need to stray into the exotic terrain of warped space-time and Einstein’s general relativity. Our sensation of gravity here on planet Earth comes not from the force of gravity exerted on us by the Earth, but by the competition between that force and all the stuff that gets in the way of it. If you are sitting now, you feel your weight because the chair is stopping you from falling to the floor. The actual sensation of weight I feel right now is due to pressure of a chair seat against the backs of my legs, the pressure of the floor against the bottom of my feet, and the pressure throughout my body produced by the weight of head on neck, torso on lower back, and so forth. So there are two ways to get rid of that pressure: get rid of the Earth, or get rid of the chair. If the chair beneath you were instantly snatched away, you would fall to the floor. And in that split second you would not feel the pressure of the chair on your backside. That sensation of weight would be gone, even though the Earth’s gravity is still very much present.

How about the weight of your head on your neck, etc? Galileo’s famous experiment at the tower of Pisa gives us the answer. Here again, though we may be familiar with the facts of the experiment, the implications are difficult to internalize: gravity makes everything fall at the same speed, whether it be a feather or a hammer, a head or a body. We (and centuries of thinkers between Aristotle and Galileo) have a hard time with this because air does a better job of slowing a feather than it does of slowing a hammer, so, in fact, the feather does fall slower. But if you get rid of the air (easy enough in a small lab experiment), they all fall at exactly the same rate. So when that chair is snatched away, all parts of your body will fall toward the floor at exactly the same rate. There will be no pressure of any part pushing up against any other part. And since that pressure is what we experience as weight, its absence gives us, in that brief period before slamming into the floor, “weightlessness.”

And yet we are still experiencing the Earth’s gravitational pull. In fact, in physics the term “weight” refers not to the pressure we feel from the chair, but simply the force of gravity acting on an object. Removing the chair does nothing to alter that force. It removes instead what is called the “normal force” of the chair that exactly cancels the force of gravity acting on our bodies. The rigid structure of the chair exerts an upward force on our bodies that keeps us from moving down due to the force of gravity. One might then consider the sensation we experience when the chair disappears not to be weightlessness, but normallessness.

I don’t think that will catch on.

We usually associate “weightlessness” with the image of astronauts “floating” inside a spaceship. This gives the impression of motionlessness (I’m going to see how many words I can add “lessness” to). However, it is the very large motion of these astronauts that makes them “weightless”. They are in a spaceship that is falling toward the Earth. There is no chair holding it up. And because the spaceship and the astronaut (like the hammer and the feather) fall toward the Earth at the same rate, the astronaut does not move relative to the spaceship. She appears to float inside it, yet there is nothing holding her up. Both she and the spaceship are falling freely toward the center of the Earth. Happily, they will not hit the Earth because previously, rockets accelerated the spaceship to such a high speed that by the time it has fallen the distance needed to hit the Earth, it has zipped over so much of the Earth that the curvature of the Earth has made the surface that much further away from the spaceship again. Here, then, is the similarity between the apple and the Moon that Newton recognized: the Moon is falling toward the Earth, but because of its great speed, it keeps missing the Earth.

An orbiting object such as the Moon or the space station is simply falling toward the Earth, but missing it.

So the only connection between space (as in “outer space”) and weightlessness is that getting above the atmosphere is the easiest way to fall for a very long time without running into something. But the exact same thing happens (for a very short time) when you snatch the chair out from under someone. So, “weightlessness” can be achieved by finding a way to fall for an extended period of time without any slowing due to air friction or, preferably, uncomfortably hard landings. Parabolic airplane flights accomplish this by flying the same path that an object falling toward the Earth would follow if there were no atmosphere. Because this is easily calculated, pilots can fly planes on such paths. While they do so, everything inside the plane follows the path than an object falling toward the Earth would follow if there were no atmosphere. So the airplane seat is falling as fast as you are, and it therefore doesn’t push up on you. Your arms are falling as fast as your shoulders, so they do not pull down on you either. You experience “weightlessness” because you are falling freely very quickly. The pilots make sure to achieve crashlessness (okay, that’s a stretch) on the flight by having the plane pull up before it heads toward the Earth too quickly. When it does, your body wants to head toward the Earth quickly, but the plane is rudely interrupting that fall and exerts a pressure against you that is much greater than normal. We thus feel heavy or excessive weight.

In fact, you are, when “weightless” accelerating at 1-g, where g is 9.8 meters per second per second. Right now, sitting on a chair in a normal terrestrial environment, your acceleration is zero-g. Weightlessness is really motion at 1-g, and not zero-g. The net force acting on us when we feel heavy is zero, while the net force acting on us when we feel weightless is equal to the local force due to gravity.