This free fall calculator is a tool for finding the velocity of a falling object along with the distance it travels. Thanks to this tool, you will be able to apply the free fall equation for any object, be it an apple you drop, or a person skydiving. Read on to learn the free fall definition and discover the most daring examples, including the highest free fall in history (spoiler alert: it broke the sound barrier! If you don't know what that is, check out the speed of sound formula). We'll also explain what free fall acceleration is and why we assume it's constant. Make sure to have a look at the projectile motion calculator, which describes a particular case of free fall combined with horizontal motion. Prefer watching rather than reading? Check out our deep dive into the concept of free fall here:
In free fall, an object moves under the influence of gravitational force only. The only acceleration is the acceleration of gravity g. No other force, including air resistance, is acting on such an object. Interestingly, an object in free fall doesn't necessarily need to be falling (that is, moving downwards). For example, the Moon's motion satisfies all of the conditions listed above: there is no other force acting on it other than gravity (it's being pulled towards the Earth), and there is no air resistance, as there is no air in space. Why doesn't the Moon crash into Earth, then? It's because Moon's speed is not directed towards Earth, but tangentially to its orbit. Since the Moon is moving along an elliptic orbit with the first cosmic velocity, its motion generates a centrifugal force, equal and opposite to the force of gravity.
From the definition of velocity, we can find the velocity of a falling object is: v = v₀ + gtwhere:
Without the effect of air resistance, each object in free fall would keep accelerating by 9.80665 m/s (approximately equal to 32.17405 ft/s) every second. In reality, though, a falling object's velocity is constrained by a value called the terminal velocity. What is the terminal velocity? As you have seen above, the free fall acceleration is constant, which means that the gravitational force acting on an object is constant, too. The force of air resistance, however, increases with increasing free fall speed. At some point, the two forces become equal in magnitude. According to Newton's first law, at that point, the falling body stops accelerating and moves at a constant speed. This speed is the terminal velocity. In this free fall calculator, we neglect the influence of air resistance. If you want to consider it, head over to our free fall with air resistance calculator.
If you want to calculate the distance traveled by a falling object, you need to write down the equation of motion. If the initial displacement and velocity are both equal to zero, it boils down to: s = (1/2)gt²If the object is already traveling with an initial velocity, you have to take it into account, too: s = v₀t + (1/2)gt²You can immediately see that the object distance traveled is proportional to the fall time squared. It means that with each second, the falling body travels a substantially larger distance than before. Another interesting fact is that according to the free fall formula, the distance does not depend on the mass of the falling object. If you drop a feather and a brick, they will hit the ground at the same time... Or at least that's what science says! If you try to perform an experiment, you'll notice that, in reality, the brick falls to the ground first. Why does that happen? Again, because of air resistance. If you dropped the two items in a vacuum, they would both hit the ground at the same instant!
Still not sure how our free fall calculator works? Don't worry - we prepared a simple example to walk you through it.
You might already have learned the free fall equation, but it's one thing to understand the theory and a completely different one to experience it. There are many ways to experience the thrill of a free fall - you could, for example, jump with a parachute or try bungee jumping! Technically, such a jump doesn't fulfill all the requirements of a free fall - there is substantial air resistance involved. In fact, a real free fall is only possible in a vacuum. Nevertheless, this is as close to the actual experience as you can get on Earth 😉 One of the most extreme examples of an almost-scientifically-correct free fall is the jump of Dr. Alan Eustace, Google's VP of Knowledge, in 2014. Eustace jumped from a heart-stopping height of 135,908 feet (41,425 m), thus setting a new record for a parachute jump. Surprisingly, Eustace declined Google's help in the jump and funded the project himself. It's not an easy endeavor, because such a leap required him to go up in a special balloon, and wear a custom-designed spacesuit that protected him from sudden shifts in temperature (after all, he was jumping from the edge of space). The fall itself took 15 minutes, and the maximum speed exceeded 800 miles per hour - far over the sound barrier!
It is not. An object in free fall will still have a weight, governed by the equation W = mg, where W is the object’s weight, m is the object’s mass, and g is the acceleration due to gravity. Weight, however, does not affect an object's free falling speed. Two identically shaped objects weighing a different amount will hit the ground at the same time.
Free fall is when an object is falling, only being affected by the force of gravity, while weightlessness is when an object has no weight due to there being no effect from gravity (it still has mass). Weightlessness can be achieved either in space or if an equal force can be applied in the opposite direction of gravity.
Before we get into the subject of gravity and how it acts, it's important to understand the difference between weight and mass. We often use the terms "mass" and "weight" interchangeably in our daily speech, but to an astronomer or a physicist they are completely different things. The mass of a body is a measure of how much matter it contains. An object with mass has a quality called inertia. If you shake an object like a stone in your hand, you would notice that it takes a push to get it moving, and another push to stop it again. If the stone is at rest, it wants to remain at rest. Once you've got it moving, it wants to stay moving. This quality or "sluggishness" of matter is its inertia. Mass is a measure of how much inertia an object displays. Weight is an entirely different thing. Every object in the universe with mass attracts every other object with mass. The amount of attraction depends on the size of the masses and how far apart they are. For everyday-sized objects, this gravitational pull is vanishingly small, but the pull between a very large object, like the Earth, and another object, like you, can be easily measured. How? All you have to do is stand on a scale! Scales measure the force of attraction between you and the Earth. This force of attraction between you and the Earth (or any other planet) is called your weight. If you are in a spaceship far between the stars and you put a scale underneath you, the scale would read zero. Your weight is zero. You are weightless. There is an anvil floating next to you. It's also weightless. Are you or the anvil mass-less? Absolutely not. If you grabbed the anvil and tried to shake it, you would have to push it to get it going and pull it to get it to stop. It still has inertia, and hence mass, yet it has no weight. See the difference? As stated above, your weight is a measure of the pull of gravity between you and the body you are standing on. This force of gravity depends on a few things. First, it depends on your mass and the mass of the planet you are standing on. If you double your mass, gravity pulls on you twice as hard. If the planet you are standing on is twice as massive, gravity also pulls on you twice as hard. On the other hand, the farther you are from the center of the planet, the weaker the pull between the planet and your body. The force gets weaker quite rapidly. If you double your distance from the planet, the force is one-fourth. If you triple your separation, the force drops to one-ninth. Ten times the distance, one-hundredth the force. See the pattern? The force drops off with the square of the distance. If we put this into an equation it would look like this:
 The two "M's" on top are your mass and the planet's mass. The "r" below is the distance from the center of the planet. The masses are in the numerator because the force gets bigger if they get bigger. The distance is in the denominator because the force gets smaller when the distance gets bigger. Note that the force never becomes zero no matter how far you travel. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the poem by Francis Thompson: All things by immortal power near or far to each other hiddenly linked are. That thou cans't not stir a flower without troubling a star.
Isaac Newton This equation, first derived by Sir Isaac Newton, tells us a lot. For instance, you may suspect that because Jupiter is 318 times as massive as the Earth, you should weigh 318 times what you weigh at home. This would be true if Jupiter was the same size as the Earth. But, Jupiter is 11 times the radius of the Earth, so you are 11 times further from the center. This reduces the pull by a factor of 112 resulting in about 2.53 times the pull of Earth on you. Standing on a neutron star makes you unimaginably weighty. Not only is the star very massive to start with (about the same as the Sun), but it is also incredibly small (about the size of San Francisco), so you are very close to the center and r is a very small number. Small numbers in the denominator of a fraction lead to very large results! |
Suppose you are standing at a height of 4r from the centre of earth what will be your weight
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