Draper Laboratory is getting a fresh $250,000 from NASA to test gravity-imitating spacesuit technology on a commercial parabolic research flight perhaps as soon as this fall. The April 22 grant from NASA's Flight Opportunities Program follows a $500,000 award Draper received from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program in late 2012 for a two-year effort to develop technology that could be integrated into an astronaut's clothing to better adapt to the disorienting effects of weightlessness. Seamus Tuohy, director of Draper's space systems division here, said the lab has matched NASA's money with about $500,000 of its own to further develop the Variable Vector Countermeasure Suit, which could one day give astronauts a sense of "down" while floating in space. The so-called V2Suit that Draper engineers envision will incorporate an inertial measurement unit and control moment gyroscopes (CMGs), the same technology that enables satellites to keep a desired orientation. If an astronaut were to raise his or her arm, for example, the CMGs would spin up and emulate the resistance of Earth's gravity.
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