– Why did the feather and the hammer fall at the same speed on the moon, but slower than they would fall in a vacuum on earth?

Question

If mass does not affect the speed at which they fall, then the mass of the object they are falling towards should not matter either, and yet obviously it does.

In: 0

Answer 1

They fall the same way on earth UNTIL AIR RESISTANCE BECOMES RELEVANT. Which for a feather, is pretty soon. But if you drop both from let’s say, 5millimeters onto a table, they will fall almost at the same speed. It’s just, with such a dense atmosphere, here on earth most things are slows down by air and the only way to overcome it is to have a big mass, therefore more force pulling the item to the floor. This extra force will help the hammer to win air resistance, for a while. But also a falling hammer will reach a speed at which air resistance will stabilize the fall, it’s called terminal velocity, the speed at which a specific object would stop accelerating because of air drag.