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#### Microgravity The prefix "micro" is a Greek word that means "small". Microgravity, though, is not "small gravity." Gravity is one form of acceleration. On Earth, gravity is 32.2 ft/sec2. On a space shuttle, objects experience about .000001 the amount of Earth's gravity. That's very small! Scientists and engineers refer to this as "microgravity". If you stepped off a roof five meters above Earth, you would land on the ground in just one second. In a microgravity environment with one hundredth of Earth's gravitational acceleration, the same drop would take 10 seconds. In a one-millionth (gravity) environment, the same drop would take 1,000 seconds, or about 17 minutes! Therefore a microgravity environment is one that will impart a small acceleration to an object. In practice, such accelerations will range from about one hundredth to about one millionth of the gravitational acceleration near the surface of the Earth. Check that you understand what these words mean in this document Acceleration: the act of increasing speed. To impart: to give to somebody or something.