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Astronaut to Run the Boston Marathon From Space
BostonBehindTheScenes writes "American astronaut Sunita Williams will run 26.2 miles on a treadmill on Patriot's Day (April 16th for those of you outside of Massachusetts) while runners on the ground will compete in the 111th Boston Marathon, according to this New Scientist article.
And yes, she is an actual registered participant who qualified by finishing among the top 100 women in the Houston Marathon in 2006. NASA's press release touts this as yet another space first."
I protest! She is wasting precious oxygen paid for by you the taxpayer.
Moooooommm, Sunie's hogging all the oxygen again!
Sunie, Cut it out. Don't antaonize your sister.
But, I gotta win the maaarathonn.
Well, do it quietly, dear. Your sister has experiments to conduct.
meh
Yes, I know this is Slashdot. But I'm a geek and a passionate marathon runner as well...
There's a big difference between running on a treadmill and on a road (besides the boring factor): the relative wind resistance you experience when you move has a very significant impact on your speed. A rule of thumb is that you have to subtract about 1 km/h to your treadmill speed in order to have an idea on how fast you can go on the road.
...like a locker room.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Lighten up. I seriously doubt her numbers will be "official". She is running on a treadmill in zero G. It is publicity for the Boston Marathon, and likely good physiological research for NASA.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
For the unaware, Patriots' Day commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord which are considered to be the first skirmishes of the American Revolution, a conflict that was actually fought be people generally considered to be patriots.
We in Massachusetts have been observing this day long before a certain President co-opted the name to add a bit of jingo to the commemoration of a certain day in September.
Will she be wearing diapers?!
... the C shell?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Seriously, what would our outer-space neighbours think if they picked that moment to swing by and pay us a visit? They're just going to scratch their heads and think we're some backwards species that powers space flight by putting funny sweaty little creatures on treadmills!
It's called zero gee by the people who fly people into space and refers to the acceleration of the astronaut's frame of reference. Freefall without rotation is a zero gee environment. Good enough for me even though technically the astronauts live in a 10^-3 or 10^-4 gee environment due to tidal forces and the mass of the ISS.
She's going to have tethers to keep her down. As a runner, I think it would be an interesting approximation of running.
While the impact against the treadmill could well be compared to gravity, I wonder whether the zero-gravity will make it harder for her heart to pump blood to her legs. I couldn't imagine running upside down.
Also, having run on the treadmill, I think a good approximation of running outside would be to set the incline to about 1.5%. Of course, that starts to disproportionately work out your quads as opposed to your hamstrings.
I'm a patriot, and I can name it. It was the war of the treasonous, ungrateful colonists ;-)
I think it's pretty clear that the OP is well aware that the spacecraft is not beyond the range of influence of the Earth's gravity (which is infinite, after all).
At the same time though, in General Relativity a gravitational field is equivalent to an accelerating frame of reference (or something like that...), so the sum total gravitational effects experienced in the spacecraft's frame of reference is near zero.
It could be argued that "zero gravity" is misleading as it will help perpetuate the common myth that weightlessness is due to being beyond the Earth's gravity, rather than it being cancelled out due to the acceleration, but nonetheless, that's a term used to refer to it, and I think it's clear that the OP wasn't misunderstanding the differences.
I'd question that labelling it as "scientifically inaccurate" constitutes POV, especially when it is backed up only by one person, who is described as a journalist and historian, not a scientist.
The ISS is moving at 7.726 km/s (I checked this morning - I'm running Orbitron to track a different satellite.) 26.2 miles converts to 42.165 km, so she should traverse the course length in about 5.5 seconds.
... a two ... a three. Three.
How many steps does it take to complete a marathon from low earth orbit? A one