Short Radius Centrifuge
These personnel will be very much involved when a major undertaking in artificial gravity research begins this summer at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston Standing is Gina Pariani, test director. Others, from top to bottom, are Maneesh Arya, experiment operator; Keena Acock, experiment operator; and Freddy Ferrara, centrifuge operator. With the national impetus to return humans to the Moon and make trips to Mars and beyond, new artificial gravity studies are about to begin to find answers to a number of questions regarding human beings' ability to withstand the rigors of such travel. Overseen by NASA's Johnson Space Center, the centrifuge, pictured in other frames in this series, will be used to protect normal human test subjects from reconditioning when confined to strict bed rest in UTMB’s National Institutes of Health-sponsored General Clinical Research Center. This study, which supports NASA's Artificial Gravity Biomedical Research Project, will allow researchers to study for the first time, on a systematic basis, how artificial gravity might be used as a multi-system countermeasure against the effects of prolonged microgravity on the human body.
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