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
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.
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