Control of the Microgravity Environment on Space Station Freedom

Abstract

It is expected that Space Station Freedom will provide the United States and its partners with a low gravity environment for experiments. Although Space Station Freedom will be in a low Earth orbit, where one may initially equate "weightlessness" with zero gravity, several factors actually produce very small, or microgravity, accelerations. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the predominant factors which produce the microgravity environment. A method is also introduced which compensates for the existing microgravity environment by finding the attitude of any spacecraft which will minimize the microgravity environment within a given volume