Back at the Falcon Lander, with the minutes of the final Apollo 15 Moonwalk rapidly winding down, Astronaut David Scott had one last opportunity to give a scientific demonstration to an audience of millions back home. It came from a suggestion by friend Joe Allen, who was inspired by the experimental work of the great Italian scientist, Galileo Galilei.
More than three centuries earlier, Galileo had stood atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two weights of different sizes, proving that gravity acted equally on them, regardless of mass.
Now, in front of his own Leaning Tower—the slightly-tilted Falcon—Scott performed his own version of the experiment.
“In my left hand, I have a feather,” he told his audience, “in my right hand, a hammer. I guess one of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields. The feather happens to be, appropriately, a falcon’s feather, for our Falcon, and I’ll drop the two of them here and hopefully they’ll hit the ground at the same time.”
They did…and applause echoed throughout Mission Control.
“How about that?” Scott concluded triumphantly. “Mr Galileo was correct in his findings!” He originally planned to try it first, to check that it would work, but was worried that it might get stuck to his glove. He decided to “wing it” and, thankfully, it worked.
In his autobiography, fellow astronaut David Irwin would relate that Scott had actually carried two feathers on Apollo 15, one from the falcon mascot at the Air Force Academy. Unfortunately—and much to Scott’s irritation—Irwin accidentally stepped on it! They searched for the feather, but could only find his big bootprints. “I’m wondering,” wrote Irwin, “if hundreds of years from now somebody will find a falcon’s feather under a layer of dust on the surface of the Moon and speculate on what strange creature blew it there.”
No comments, yet...