Friday, March 12, 2010

Hammer and feather test


At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott (pictured) performed a live demonstration for the television cameras. He held out a geologic hammer and a feather and dropped them at the same time. Because they were essentially in a vacuum, there was no air resistance and the feather fell at the same rate as the hammer, as Galileo had concluded hundreds of years before - all objects released together fall at the same rate regardless of mass. Mission Controller Joe Allen described the demonstration in the "Apollo 15 Preliminary Science Report":
So you can drop an elephant and a feather and they too would reach the moon's surface at the same time.

No comments:

Post a Comment