What Does “Weight” in the International Space Station Really Mean?
Everyone loves this short video. It shows astronaut Woody Hoburg in the International Space Station during a reboost maneuver. He states that astronauts are NOT always weightless in the space station as he slowly “falls” backwards — in the opposite direction of the acceleration of the ISS.
There’s a bunch of stuff to talk about, but I’m going to start with the thing that are here for — a video analysis of his motion.
Video Analysis
It’s possible to get data for Woody’s position in each frame of the video. To do this, I’m going to use my favorite video analysis tool — Tracker Video Analysis.
The basic idea is to mark the location of an object (like a person) in each frame of the video. If I know the distance-scale in the video, this will give me both x and y position as function of time (time comes from the video frame rate). Of course, there are two small issues to deal with in this particular video.
