Posted by admin | Posted in Physics | Posted on 15-05-2008
Tags: forces, gravity, Physics, Sc4, space
What happens when you drop a heavy object and a light object at the same time? Well they should hit the ground at exactly the same time. This is because the pull of gravity is the same on each one, and so they accelerate at the same rate.
On Earth it’s hard to visualise this since air resistance also gets involved – and so if you drop a hammer and a feather the feather floats down slower than the hammer.
On the moon, there is no air, so air resistance does not affect the result. One of the experiments carried out by the Apollo astronauts on the moon was to demonstrate a hammer and feather drop and as you can see, without air resistance both the hammer and feather hit the ground at the same time.
