Acceleration of an Apollo Moon Jump
29/06/08 08:31 Filed in: Physics
I am really not sure why I started to look at this,
but here is a video of the famous “jump salute” from
Apollo 16 astronaut John Young.
It seems there is some discussion about this video in terms of fake or not fake moon landings. I don’t want to get involved in that whole mess, so I will just see if I can measure the gravitational field on the moon.
It seems there is some discussion about this video in terms of fake or not fake moon landings. I don’t want to get involved in that whole mess, so I will just see if I can measure the gravitational field on the moon.
Once again, time to crank out my favorite video
analysis tool - Tracker Video Analysis
(free). In order to do a complete analysis
of the video, I need to scale it somehow. I
first thought of using the height of the
astronaut, but I could not find that data (plus
he is wearing that space suit). Instead, I used
the length of the PLSS (Primary Life Support
System) the big back pack thing.
This site - http://www.myspacemuseum.com/plss.htm gives the length of the PLSS as 26.4 inches (0.67 meters). Now to the data:
Here is a plot of the vertical motion of the astronaut during the jump. I fit a quadratic function to the data shown in the graph. This gives a downward acceleration of 1.4 m/s2 which would correlate to 1.4 N/kg gravitational field. This is very close the the official Wikipedia value of 1.6 N/kg. I think there are two problems with this video. First, I need a better quality video - this one as duplicate frames. Second, I probably need a better item to use to scale the video. Nonetheless, this does not look like an a jump in a studio on Earth.
This site - http://www.myspacemuseum.com/plss.htm gives the length of the PLSS as 26.4 inches (0.67 meters). Now to the data:
Here is a plot of the vertical motion of the astronaut during the jump. I fit a quadratic function to the data shown in the graph. This gives a downward acceleration of 1.4 m/s2 which would correlate to 1.4 N/kg gravitational field. This is very close the the official Wikipedia value of 1.6 N/kg. I think there are two problems with this video. First, I need a better quality video - this one as duplicate frames. Second, I probably need a better item to use to scale the video. Nonetheless, this does not look like an a jump in a studio on Earth.
