http://www.freeassociations.org/
The Hammer and the Feather
Well, Dave let them go and, since there is no atmosphere on the Moon, they fell side by side. They did fall more slowly than on Earth because the gravity is one-sixth that of Earth's.
Dave continued, "How about that. This proves that Mr. Galileo was correct in his findings."
The Hammer and the Feather - YouTube
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4mTsrRZEMwAAt the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott (pictured above) 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 ...
A good place free of air resistance to test this equivalence principle is Earth's Moon, and so in 1971, Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott dropped both a hammer and a feather together toward the surface of the Moon. Sure enough, just as scientists including Galileo and Einstein would have predicted, they reached the lunar surface at the same time. The demonstrated equivalence principle states that the acceleration an object feels due to gravity does not depend on its ...
David Scott ,Galileo
http://www.americaspace.com/2012/07/29/mr-galileo-was-correct-the-legacy-of-apollo-15/
Back at the lander, with the minutes of the final Moonwalk rapidly winding down, Scott had one last opportunity to give a scientific demonstration to an audience of millions back home. It came from a suggestion by Joe Allen, who was inspired by the experimental work of Galileo Galilei. More than three centuries earlier, Galileo had stood atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two weights of different sizes, proving that gravity acted equally on them, regardless of mass. Now, in front of his own Leaning Tower – the slightly-tilted Falcon – Scott performed his own version of the experiment.
“In my left hand, I have a feather,” he told his audience, “in my right hand, a hammer. I guess one of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields. The feather happens to be, appropriately, a falcon’s feather, for our Falcon, and I’ll drop the two of them here and hopefully they’ll hit the ground at the same time.”
They did…and applause echoed throughout Mission Control.
“How about that?” Scott concluded triumphantly. “Mr Galileo was correct in his findings!” He originally planned to try it first, to check that it would work, but was worried that it might get stuck to his glove. He decided to ‘wing it’ and, thankfully, it worked. In his autobiography, Irwin would relate that Scott had actually carried two feathers on Apollo 15, one from the falcon mascot at the Air Force Academy. Unfortunately – and much to Scott’s irritation – Irwin accidentally stepped on it! They searched for the feather, but could only find his big bootprints. “I’m wondering,” wrote Irwin, “if hundreds of years from now somebody will find a falcon’s feather under a layer of dust on the surface of the Moon and speculate on what strange creature blew it there.”
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