ASA’s zero-gravity plane: How astronauts train for microgravity | Michelle Thaller

A lot goes into being weightless. - There is no way to shield astronauts on earth from the effects of gravity. - Astronauts train for space by going on an airplane that flies high at an arc so that the force lifts them in the air. However, we can only achieve about a minute's worth of weightlessness this way. - NASA researchers have nicknamed this plane the "Vomit Comet." Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit NASA. Read more at BigThink.com: https://ift.tt/2UGWonA Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink