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In classical mechanics, free fall is any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. A freely falling object may not necessarily be falling down in the vertical direction . An object moving upwards might not normally be considered to be falling, but if it is subject to only the force of gravity, it is said to be in free fall.
A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force. At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body's acceleration multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time.
Based on air resistance, for example, the terminal speed of a skydiver in a belly-to-earth (i.e., face down) free fall position is about 55 m/s (180 ft/s). [3] This speed is the asymptotic limiting value of the speed, and the forces acting on the body balance each other more and more closely as the terminal speed is approached. In this example ...
where F is the gravitational force acting between two objects, m 1 and m 2 are the masses of the objects, r is the distance between the centers of their masses, and G is the gravitational constant. The first test of Newton's law of gravitation between masses in the laboratory was the Cavendish experiment conducted by the British scientist Henry ...
While the weight of an object varies in proportion to the strength of the gravitational field, its mass is constant, as long as no energy or matter is added to the object. [3] For example, although a satellite in orbit (essentially a free-fall) is "weightless", it still retains its mass and inertia.
During the first 0.05 s the ball drops one unit of distance (about 12 mm), by 0.10 s it has dropped at total of 4 units, by 0.15 s 9 units, and so on. Near the surface of the Earth, the acceleration due to gravity g = 9.807 m/s 2 ( metres per second squared , which might be thought of as "metres per second, per second"; or 32.18 ft/s 2 as "feet ...
During the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, astronaut David Scott showed that Galileo was right: acceleration is the same for all bodies subject to gravity on the Moon, even for a hammer and a feather. Three main forms of the equivalence principle are in current use: weak (Galilean), Einsteinian, and strong.
In classical mechanics and kinematics, Galileo's law of odd numbers states that the distance covered by a falling object in successive equal time intervals is linearly proportional to the odd numbers. That is, if a body falling from rest covers a certain distance during an arbitrary time interval, it will cover 3, 5, 7, etc. times that distance ...