If you watched the movie, you will probably understand what I meant since it’s part of the ending scenes where they need to grab some oxygen from the tanks.
If you didn’t, let me “try” to explain: their ship is composite by two endings connected by long poles with a solar panel in the middle. Something goes wrong and they need to move from and ending to another ( let’s call it Point A to Point B). To do that, they start to “climb” outside Point A these poles until they reach the “middle” mark, and then they start to descent, like the gravity was inverted, until they reach point B.Is that a real physical contempt? If so, what’s it’s called and how it works?
PS: the spaceship is spinning during their whole voyage to Mars.
In: Physics
I havent seen it personally BUT the way you’ve described it there it sounds like the gravity is supposed to be generated by centrifugal force, so it’s the same as when your clothes stick to the side of the washing machine drum when it’s spinning, so if the station is spinning in theory there would be no gravitational pull in any direction, but once you’re slightly off centre youd be pulled to the side yiure closest to. I’m not sure on how it would work in the vacuum of space outside the ship/ station though but I’d also imagine the film makers might have not considered that/ ignored it for artistic licence
I haven’t seen the movie, but if it’s not “magic” scifi, then the only way to feel “gravity” in space is to basically have a space ship rotating like a centrifuge, with the residents walking around on the inner rim of it. If you climb through the ship to the other side, “gravity” will appear to flip around once you get past the halfway point.
If this isn’t what happens in that movie, then the method of gravity generation is just pure fantasy and terms relating to it will likely be too.
Have you ever been on a kids roundabouts? Like at a play park? Spinning platform thing with poles to hang on to. Say you’re standing at one side of it and you want to get across the middle to the other side. Because it’s spinning, you are being thrown to the outside by centripetal force. (This isn’t a real force, but that’s another discussion!) So it takes effort to pull yourself in to the middle. Once you get there and get to the other side of the middle, that same centripetal force is pushing you outwards towards where you want to go. If you want to get there more slowly, you need to pull yourself back so you don’t ‘fall’ out.
It sounds like the ship you’re describing is basically this. The ‘gravity’ is just the force pushing you out from the middle of the spinning ship. The middle then becomes like the top of a hill, where a small nudge in any direction would have you ‘falling’ to the sides.
the ship is probably rotating. The inversion point is where the centrifugal force changes direction, as you cross the rotation axis.
> their ship is composite by two endings connected by long poles with a solar panel in the middle
Their ship is connected by *cables* and the two ends are spinning around that center point to provide tension in the cables and artificial spin gravity in the pods at the end
The ship functions like a weird [Round up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_Up_(ride)) where everything is rotating around that central pod with solar panels. Since both point A and point B are spinning, both are trying to be flung away from the central point but are held in by their cables, but if you were to try to climb those cables, you would feel the centrifugal force pushing you down the cable and away from the central pod regardless of if you’re going to Point A or Point B, you’re always flung *away* from the center
[Scott Manley apparently got to weigh in on their ship design and has a good video explaining how it works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCwXJMVVdck)
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