the.com/microgravity
Not zero gravity — just falling fast enough to miss the ground forever.
means The near-weightless condition experienced in orbit or free fall, where gravity hasn't vanished but objects are falling together so there's almost no sensation of weight.
from Built from Greek 'mikros' (small) plus 'gravity', from Latin 'gravitas' (weight, heaviness) — a 20th-century scientific coinage from the space age, needed once engineers had to describe orbiting spacecraft, where gravity is only slightly reduced but its pull on everything is effectively canceled by continuous free fall. The 'micro' doesn't mean gravity is tiny there; it means the measurable effects of gravity on a falling object become vanishingly small.
- not zero
- ISS still feels about 90 percent of Earth's gravity
- real cause
- constant freefall, not distance from Earth
- body effects
- fluids shift upward, puffing faces, shrinking legs
- bone loss
- astronauts lose up to 1 percent bone density monthly