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Q&A

What minimal radius is needed for rotation to simulate gravitation without adverse effects on humans?

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A quite common idea to provide "gravitation" in space stations is to make them rotate, so the centrifugal force gives an effective gravitation. A possible design is a ring-shaped space station.

Now of course it is easy to calculate how fast a space station has to rotate, as function of the radius, in order to provide a given g-value. Of course, the smaller the radius, the larger the needed angular velocity to provide the gravitation:

$$\omega = \sqrt{\frac{g}{r}}$$

However, a small, fast rotating a space station has two disadvantages:

  • Due to the dependence of the centrifugal force of the radius, there's a difference in the gravitational strength between head and feet. For a human of height $h$, when the floor is on radius $r$ (assuming $r>h$, of course) you get

    $$\Delta g = \frac{g h}{r}$$

    This difference might give problems; but I doubt they will be the main problem. Also, it falls off quite quickly with $r$, so with any halfway reasonable size of the space station, I guess it should be no issue.

  • Due to the rotation you get a Coriolis force. This should mess with the human sense of balance. Moreover, since it is proportional to $\omega$ (more exactly, for running perpendicular to the rotation axis, it's $2\omega v$), it only falls off with the square root of the radius, so I guess that is the determining factor to decide which radius is needed.

  • Also an effect is that when moving, the direction of "gravitation" will change as you walk around the ring. This I guess will tend to cause you to stumble as soon as you walk, let alone run, if the radius is too low. I have no idea how well humans can adapt to this (or if that question has even been studied).

So my question is:

What would be the minimal radius for a space station, if there should be no problematic effects for humans?

Assume aiming for earth-like gravity ($g=10\,\rm m/s^2$), normal size humans (height up to not much more than 2 meters) and people may run (from 100 meter sprint times, one may assume a maximum speed of about 10 m/s). Also, we can assume there's only one floor (no "upstairs" with different radius).

Note that this is not really a question about physics (how to calculate the physical quantities is clear to me) but more a question about human physiology (how weak do we have to make the effects to not cause problems), thus the tag.

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