Scientists no longer need to travel into space to conduct some outer space
experiments. In France, the country's space agency offers a zero gravity
flight where the simulation of weightlessness is reproduced to help experts
find out how to grow plants in Mars and study the impact of gravity on blood
pressure regulation.

BORDEAUX, FRANCE REUTERS -
As Europe joins the race for space exploration, scientists in
France are being invited to join a flight offered by the country's space
agency that reproduces the same weightlessness as in space in order for them
to conduct important research experiments.

During a conference in Bordeaux, the headquarters for France's space
agency, experts discussed the final details of a special flight on an Airbus
300 which was basically converted into a flying laboratory offering European
space scientists ideal conditions in which to carry out research in zero
gravity conditions.

Like an elevator, a spacecraft in orbit keeps falling -- but over the
horizon -- following the earth's curvature. The zero gravity flights take off
and ascends at a sharp 45 degree angle, reach a certain altitude and then free
fall over an arc in the earth's curvature. These types of flights are being
increasingly used for research and to prepare equipment for the International
Space Station.

Novespace, a unit of France's CNES space agency and the 17-nation
European Space Agency, claims to be leading the field in scientific deployment
with the converted Airbus A300 jetliner.

This flying laboratory allows scientists to access zero-gravity
conditions without having to go into space.

"I would say to a scientist who needs micro-gravity for research:
either he can wait a bit more to go in space by flying first on this Airbus,
or if they don't need to go in space for their research because 22 seconds is
enough, thirty to forty times in a given flight, then, you come to Zero-G
Airbus and they can produce science and publish in good magazines without the
need to go in space" said Jean-François Clervoy, an French astronaut and
director of Novespace.

Students from across Europe and from prestigious universities gathered
in Bordeaux to prepare and install their experiments on the Zero-G Airbus.
Research conducted during the flight included experiments funded by the
European Space Agency to understand the effects of zero gravity on blood
pressure, find out how to grow plants in space for future 2 or 3-year manned
missions to Mars and to understand the causes of temperature changes in that
planet.

"Mars is a very, very important question for human kind because
this planet was warm and humid, and now it's a frozen dead rock. So we have
to understand what happened because it could concern us also," said the
head of the French space agency, Yannick D'Escatha.

To achieve a point of weightlessness, French test pilots fly the Airbus
along a series of parabolic arcs in an air corridor over the Atlantic,
resembling an 8,000-foot high roller coaster.

Passengers feel twice their normal weight during the steep 45 degree
climb but experience 22 seconds of weightlessness, floating as the plane flies
along the crest of the arc when the engine power is sharply reduced.
Peter Norsk has been flying on parabolic flights for years. As part of
his research on blood pressure, he served as a human 'guinea pig' and had his
blood pressure taken in both zero and double gravity.

The study aims to establish how the blood pressure reacts to gravity
changes and how gravity participates in the development of hypertension, the
most common cause for heart failure and stroke.

"We are interested in the effect of gravity on blood pressure
regulation, therefore it is ideal to do parabolic flights because you can
change the G stress, the gravitational stress from zero to two and we will
then measure blood pressure in humans at the same time. One purpose is also to
understand whether body height, that means how tall you are, whether that
determines your blood pressure regulation because if it is the case, we know
that gravity plays a major role maybe in hyper tension and blood pressure
regulation" said Peter Norsk, a scientist and researcher at Copenhagen
University in Denmark.

From the findings, Peter Norsk questioned whether tall people were more
at risk than shorter people to suffer heart failure.
Dieter Volkmann studies how gravity changes impacts the growth of
plants.

The latest experiments have shown that gravity-changing conditions
generate strong and rapid responses in plants' roots, with changes in oxygen
consumption and even changes in the plants' genes.

This, in the long-run could allow the growing of plants in the
International Space Station and to cultivate plants on other planets.

"Maybe one day we will be able to grow plants on different other
planets, on Mars for example, but we know how they behave under micro gravity,
also under lower gravity, like Mars that has 0.7 gravity of our Earth, and so
on. So we need lots of information about the communication between plants, in
the plant itself, how they survive under a stressful situation," said
Volkmann.

The experiment showed that even very short exposures to micro gravity
were perceived as stress situations inducing immediate oxidative burst-like
responses.

Brief doses of weightlessness without going into space have been
available for decades on specially converted airliners such as NASA's
"Vomit Comet," which trained a generation of American astronauts and
was used to film "Apollo 13".