Bowling balls and the salt Flats
Some time ago Kim Hyatt had the idea to look for meteorites on (or would that be "in") the Salt Flats. That led some to wonder how deeply a fleshly fallen space rock would bury itself in the salt. And, being the crazies some of us are we thought, "Why not find out?" "Let's fly over the Salt Flats, drop a bowling ball and, provided we can find it, see how far it goes into the salt." So now we're doing a bit of number crunching to find out how high a bowling ball would have to be dropped from in order to have it impact at terminal velocity. Anyone out there care to give that problem a shot and report back here? How far would a bowling ball have to fall to reach the ground at terminal and what is terminal velocity for a bowling ball? The one answer we have so far says: "Terminal velocity is about 117 meters/sec. The bowling ball will reach 99.99% of terminal velocity at 59 seconds, after falling about 5922 meters." Cheers! Patrick
Hi Patrick, On Fri, 3 Jan 2003, Patrick Wiggins wrote:
The one answer we have so far says:
"Terminal velocity is about 117 meters/sec. The bowling ball will reach 99.99% of terminal velocity at 59 seconds, after falling about 5922 meters."
Take a look at this page: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/airfri2.html#c5 What are the dimensions and density of the average bowling ball, anyway? Taking a guess and plugging in numbers for an eight-inch bowling ball (radius 0.1016m) with the same density as water (about a ten pound ball), the calculator on that page shows a terminal velocity of about 64 m/s. YMMV. :-) Cheerio, Chris
participants (2)
-
Chris Clark -
Patrick Wiggins