NASA’s Space Power Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, is the biggest vacuum chamber in the world, measuring 30.5 meters by 37.2 meters, and has a volume of 22,653 cubic meters. If you watched Commander David Scott drop a hammer and a feather on the televised Apollo 15 mission, then you probably already know how this one ends, but that doesn’t make watching it play out any less spectacular.
It was Galileo who first discovered that in a vacuum, if you were to drop two objects from the same height, they’d hit the ground at exactly the same time, regardless of their respective mass. In the atmosphere of Earth, we rarely – if ever – get to see this phenomenon. That’s where this big vacuum chamber comes in
British physicist Brian Cox wanted to see this phenomenon play out in a vacuum, where there is zero air resistance to affect the acceleration of Earth’s gravity. This was filming done for the BBC 2 show, Human Universe,
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I remember seeing David Scott drop the objects on the moon, and they did hit the ground at the same time. That was a pretty neat proof of Galileo’s theory. In this BBC clip, though, it actually looks like the feathers hit the surface of that box first, fractions of a second first. Was I just seeing an optical illusion due to the slow motion videotape, or was this something else?
Lets not forget the great experimental scientist who perfected the first vacuum chamber and helped Boyle define his famous law.
Robert Hooke.
His dispute with Newton and his subsequent letters on calcuating gravity and the orbit of the planets set off a scientific revolution.