Ready to go for a spin? SPACE.com - There is no doubt that future Red Planet explorers will be more than a little weak-in-the-knees after a round-trip jaunt lasting some three years. Research shows that exposure to microgravity weakens muscle, causes bone loss and plays havoc with a person's balance and coordination. But a team of scientists and engineers here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Man-Vehicle Laboratory are tackling the problem with experiments in artificial gravity. Artificial gravity has long been viewed as the most effective way to prevent deconditioning of space travelers. In the 1950's, for example, space visionary Wernher von Braun saw a huge, rotating space station to keep occupants fit and functional. So too did moviemaker Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur Clarke in the two-thumbs-up sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. But now there's a new spin on creating artificial gravity. "There's the growing notion that we must get away from a large and expensive-to-build spinning wheel and get down to something considerably smaller," said MIT's Laurence Young, professor of aeronautics and astronautics. Young and his colleagues are hard at work on investigating use of a personal centrifuge. Just a few yards (meters) in radius, the device is too small to live in. Yet an astronaut could get something akin to a gravitational massage using the scheme. "I call it a spin in the gym," Young told SPACE.com. "You go into such a device for a workout, just like you go to the gym," he said.