Free fall acceleration of gravity?

Question

What i dont get this, i dont get free fall, how does it work i know the only force acting is gravity but can someone please help me, i think it is this but its not i know, when we are in free fall we are travelling at the same rate as gravity am i right or am i wrong tell me please and explain as simply as possible in detail, and give examples thanks ! :D

and
Im talking about when your free falling in space;
when your weightless

Answer 1

This is a fun answer and I always enjoy explaining it.



Imagine you're in an elevator and it begins to fall. You will begin to experience a feeling of weightlessness. This is the same feeling that astronauts feel all the time. How are they constantly feeling like they're falling? It's because they are.



Now imagine you're the pitcher for a baseball team. You're trying to practice throwing pitches that go perfectly parallel to the ground. You go out to your front yard and you throw as hard as you can. The ball goes 30 feet and falls toward the earth in a parabolic curve until the ground stops it from falling any more. Imagine you hit the gym, get really strong and go back to trying to throw the ball. This time you can throw it 100 feet before it hits the ground. You'd be a pretty good pitcher for the earth, but your pitches still hit the ground.



Let's move our baseball team to a moon. Not just any moon, a small but dense moon. It only has a 10th the mass of the earth, but it is very very small. You decide that you're going to toss the ball to a friend to warm up. You notice that at a nice leisurely toss, you can thrown the ball hundreds of feet before it lands again on the surface. You finally get ready to start pitching. You throw the ball so hard that it actually escapes the gravitational force of the moon and hurls itself into outer space. You'll have to tone it down a bit. Eventually you get it perfect. When you throw the ball, it begins to fall toward the moon. Except it is falling toward the moon at the exact rate that the curvature of the surface of the planet is moving away. A couple minutes after you throw the ball, you turn around and see the ball that you threw coming around the planet. You have thrown the ball into orbit. It is moving so fast horizontally. When something goes into orbit, it is doing nothing more than falling AROUND the planet. You can play catch with yourself!

Answer 2

Well, THAT answer was sure "fun", but it did not answer your question. "... the same rate as gravity... " does not enter into the equation. In free fall, you are falling at the rate of 32 feet per second per second. This means that you are accelerating! You will continue to do so until you are stopped by some force, such as hitting a hard surface. This mysterious force called gravity is the RESULT of the warping of time/space. Any mass will warp the time/space around it.... forming sort of a funnel hole. If you enter this "funnel", you will continue to fall down it until stopped... and the rate of your fall will increase the entire time. If you enter this "funnel" at high enough speed, you will be able to merely "skim" around the funnel and not fall down it. This is what satellites such as the ISS are doing. In this case, the funnel is caused by the mass of the earth.

Answer 3

Free falling in space???

Well in space you are weightless and no known gravity acts on you there. definitely you are not going to be in the state of free fall there..

As far as falling freely in our atmosphere is concerned, you will be in the state of free fall if no other force except gravity is acting on you.

Free Fall is a state in which a body falls downward to the source of gravity under the influence of its gravity only.

consider a stone of mass 10 kg falling down freely.

just as it starts to fall down (its velocity being zero at that point) it gains an accleration because its velocity changes as it moves down. this acceleration is constant for all free falling objects. and its rate is 9.8 m/s^2. But.. you don't travel at this rate... you acclerate at this rate...!!! the reason for the same acceleration in all objects regardless of their masses is quite simple..

Earth applies a force to pull objects.

that force causes acceleration.

for objects having smaller masses, earth applies smaller force..

e.g on a 10 kg object a force of 98 N is applied.

a = m/F

g = m/W

g = 10/98 = 9.8 m/s^2

for objects having greater masses, greater force is applied.

e.g on a 100 kg object a force of 980 N is applied.

Now one may say greater forces produce greater acceleration.

but greater masses reduce the acceleration is the answer to it.

g = m/W = 100/980 = 9.8 m/s^2

so it's clear, all objects in free fall will have the same acceleration or deceleration.