May 24 – When the Disorientation Research Device comes to life at the Naval Medical Research Unit Lab on Area B of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, visitors will know about it.
“It sounds like a hurricane, and it feels like an earthquake,” Richard Folga, head of the engineering and technical support team at the unit, told recent visitors to the lab.
Almost on cue, a few moments later, a whine pierces the air and a low rumble penetrates the walls.
Smiling, Folga said, “I think you might want to walk in.”
Volunteers in the laboratory will soon have the opportunity to walk in. The NASA Glenn Research Center in the Cleveland area has found volunteers to take a ride on the Disorientation Research Device, dubbed ‘the Kraken’.
If you see the Capt. Ashton Graybiel Acceleration Research Facility, you can easily look down into a two-story deep pit, where the $19 million GL-6000 DRD moves forward and backward, a 4,500-horsepower roller coaster that offers simultaneous motion on six axes, with a horizontal reach of more than 16 feet, capable of imposing sustained planetary motion of 3G – that’s three times the force of Earth’s normal gravity.
“It’s going to happen very quickly,” said Folga, who retired from the Navy as a captain (equivalent to a colonel in the Air Force). “Our highest g-field is three G’s, and that’s (movement) of 137 degrees per second. The device can do 150 degrees per second.”
The device is essentially an agile but intimidating centrifuge that creates realistic motion simulations, allowing Air Force, Navy and NASA researchers to understand problems of disorientation and endurance. Here astronauts are trained, among other things, in orienting themselves in space, where ‘up’ and ‘down’ can be uncertain or ambiguous.
For this study, researchers from NASA Glenn and Johns Hopkins University hope to better understand a technology that could help people get through disorienting situations.
In this NASA/John Hopkins study, G-force levels will be relatively low. Volunteers may feel a little heavy, with minimal discomfort. They are tied to a chair, their heads immobilized.
“It will be physically challenging,” Folga said.
But those conducting the research don’t want volunteers to feel so uncomfortable that they don’t want to continue, he added.
During a recent visit, Folga was able to control the Kraken’s movements with what appeared to be an X-box controller.
“Really, it’s about motion sickness, this particular study, and it’s motion sickness in space,” he said. “Is there a countermeasure that can be used, is there a technology that can be used to help people recover? When they come back from space, (astronauts’) bodies have to reacclimate to the Earth’s gravitational field.”
This technology is being tested to see if it can help that process.
At some point when NASA returns to the moon – and moves on to Mars down the line – Folga expects astronauts from the Artemis program will visit Wright-Patterson and the Kraken for training and research. Researchers at Wright-Patterson’s Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have long been helpful to NASA and Artemis.
The Naval Aerospace Medicine Research Lab has the volunteers it needs for this specific study. But there is constant research happening in the laboratory that requires dozens of volunteers, men and women, for all kinds of studies.
Navy researchers have been at Wright-Patt since at least the mid-1970s. A Navy toxicology unit was moved to the base from Washington, D.C., in 1976 to work with a similar Air Force laboratory. An environmental health laboratory was already in place when the 2005 BRAC – the Base Realignment and Closure process – began moving another Navy science laboratory, the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Lab, to Wright-Patt, although not initially as a full-fledged command.
The combination of the Environmental Health Impact Laboratory with the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Lab created the NAMRU Dayton Medical Research Unit.
