Astronaut Drops Hammer And Feather

The Apollo 15 Hammer-Feather Drop

8.3 Mb Quicktime film of the demonstration

At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott (pictured above) performed a live sit-in for the boob tube 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 plume cruel at the same rate as the hammer, as Galileo had ended hundreds of years before - all objects released together fall at the aforementioned rate regardless of mass. Mission Controller Joe Allen described the demonstration in the "Apollo 15 Preliminary Science Report":

During the last minutes of the third extravehicular activity, a short demonstration experiment was conducted. A heavy object (a 1.32-kg aluminum geological hammer) and a light object (a 0.03-kg* falcon feather) were released simultaneously from approximately the same tiptop (approximately 1.vi m) and were immune to autumn to the surface. Inside the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to undergo the same dispatch and strike the lunar surface simultaneously, which was a result predicted by well-established theory, merely a result notwithstanding reassuring considering both the number of viewers that witnessed the experiment and the fact that the homeward journeying was based critically on the validity of the detail theory being tested.
Joe Allen, NASA SP-289, Apollo 15 Preliminary Science Study, Summary of Scientific Results, p. 2-11

(* the 0.03-kg value is also high, typical feathers take masses between 0.0003 and 0.003 kg (0.iii - 3 grams), this may be due to a typo in the report.)

The Hammer-Feather Drop - viii.3 Mb Quicktime movie

Larger Version - 80 Mb Quicktime movie

Apollo 15 Home Page

Author/Curator:
Dr. David R. Williams, dave.williams@nasa.gov
NSSDCA, Postal service Code 690.ane
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20771
+i-301-286-1258