The Unique Challenge of a Zero-Gravity Indicator
When NASA’s Artemis II crew needed a small, lightweight companion to serve as the zero-gravity indicator on its mission to orbit the Moon, it turned to an Australian crowdsourcing marketplace. ASX-listed Freelancer has helped NASA on several missions and was tasked with finding someone who could create the device used to detect when astronauts escaped Earth’s gravitational pull.
The result? A round white plush toy with a hat featuring a galaxy brim, named ‘Rise’. Lucas Ye, an eight-year-old from Mountain View, California, designed the plush device. It was chosen from 2600-plus submissions spanning more than 50 countries.
The crew, including Commander Reid Wiseman, personally selected the design, which was inspired by the iconic ‘Earthrise’ photograph from the Apollo 8 mission. The current mission is to circle around the Moon, setting a record for the deepest that humans have ever flown in space, however the crew won’t land on the lunar surface. Transporting astronauts there is the goal of a future Artemis mission, planned for 2028.
Passion and Creativity
Trisha Epp, Freelancer’s director of innovation who heads the company’s NASA partnership programs, said: “It was a privilege to see that kind of passion and creativity come through” when running the competition for the zero-gravity indicator design.
“The judging panel had a really tough time with this one. You’d open a submission, and it’d be from a student in Finland, or a science storyteller in Germany, or a child in Texas who clearly spent weeks getting every detail right,” Epp said.
“Every entry brought something personal to it – you could tell how much this meant to people.”
NASA regularly sends astronauts a couple of hundred miles above Earth, but it hasn’t mounted a flight like this one with a crew since the last Apollo mission in 1972. While NASA’s Apollo missions focused on landing crews on the lunar surface in a race with the Soviet Union, this time NASA and its allies are competing with China which plans a research base on the moon.
Epp said the Moon Mascot challenge was designed for outreach, but Freelancer’s partnership with NASA typically involved highly specialised tasks such as how to refuel spacecraft in microgravity and how to help astronauts navigate on the lunar south pole.
“The zero-gravity indicator, which sounds a little bit fancy, but it’s a cute plush toy, is probably one of the least technical problems that we’ve worked on with them,” she said.
NASA Vets Design
NASA’s thermal blanket lab vetted the design to ensure its materials would not react in an unsafe way, such as being flammable, under space flight conditions.
It comes at a time of anxiety in the global technology sector, which has lost thousands of jobs due to the advent of artificial intelligence. While coding skills have long been emphasised for children, the problems NASA and other agencies are trying to solve suggest a shift in the core competencies needed for future technological innovation.
Epp said although advanced competitions were run by Freelancer, such as a program on asteroid trajectory whereby participants used AI and machine learning alongside a “physics-based simulation”, human input was still vital.
“You have to understand, how does gravity work?” she said, adding that AI was more of a “multiplier”.
She said this approach was already inspiring a new generation, and an Australian university student who participated in a related competition was now working on a lunar rover for Australian company Lunar Outpost Oceana.
Freelancer is collaborating with Lunar Outpost Oceana to launch new crowdsourcing competitions specifically aimed at Australian students to promote involvement in space technology.
The Overview Effect
The Artemis II journey gives the crew a view of Earth from beyond lunar orbit, a perspective seen by only 24 humans previously. Swinburne psychology expert Julian Oldmeadow said this perspective consistently induced what was known as the “overview effect”.
“Astronauts describe feelings of awe, humility, and a deep sense of connection with the Earth and each other,” Dr Oldmeadow said.
He said this experience often led those who travel into space to return with reduced materialism and a heightened sense that human conflict was “trivial” compared with the planet’s fragility.
