Freefall

Hannah Long
Lynn Lopez
Katelin Mitchell

Our definition of free fall is an object that falls by it's own acceleration according to gravitational pull and its mass. While in the process of this experiment, we were trying to prove that objects of different masses should still fall at the same velocity and hit the ground at the same time. However, due to human air, the different objects did not hit at the same time. The two types of balls that were the closest to hitting the ground at the same time were the tennis ball and the bouncy ball, the other objects we dropped were not close at all. We realized that, due to air resistance, the styrofoam balls dropped slower than any other ball we dropped.

Data: D = 1/2at^2

Distance: 10.65 meters

10.65 = 1/2 (10) t^2
          = 1.459 seconds

d = 1/2at^2

10.65 = 1/2 (10) 1.459^2

10.65 = 10.64

This video shows a golf ball and a tennis ball hitting the ground at different times.

This video shows two different sizes of styrofoam balls being dropped, one small styrofoam ball and one large styrofoam ball.

We found that only the tennis ball and the bouncy ball were the closest to falling at the same velocity, meaning that they dropped at about the same time.

This video shows that the tennis ball fell the closest to what we estimated in our acceleration equation, the data for the tennis ball fell around 1.3 and 1.4. Pretty darn close!

Our Percent Error is .09%

|known value - measured value|/known value

|10.65 - 10.64|/10.65 x 100 = .094%

This is further documentation that shows that objects of different masses can fall at the same velocity. This is pretty crazy... watch and see! :)