Kind: captions
Language: en
Have you ever looked up into the night
sky and wondered what it would be like
to be an astronaut floating around in
the space station?
Why are the astronauts floating?
There's weightlessness in space. You can
experience a kind of weightlessness.
Why Why are they weightless, though? Is
there a gravitational force on them?
Yeah, but I guess it's probably really
weak.
Not on the astronauts, cuz they just
float around. like they'd float away if
it wasn't for the walls of the space
station, right?
Cuz they're outside of Earth's
gravitational pole. Oh, I see what
you've done here. I see what you've done
here. That's clever. H
cuz now I want to say that they're
outside of Earth's gravitational pole,
but I just said that the moon wasn't.
You got me. Well played.
Think about this. The space station is
only about 400 km away. So if you're in
Sydney, it's about well a little further
than the drive to CRA. Do you really
think that the Earth exerts a big
gravitational pull on you, but nothing
on the astronauts a short distance away?
as much as the force on you. So why are
they floating while you're stuck here?
The answer is the astronauts aren't
floating, they're falling.
And not only that, but the space station
that they're in is falling as well.
So why doesn't the space station come
crashing into the Earth?
Well, the reason is the space station
and the astronauts have a huge sideways
velocity of nearly 28,000 km hour. So
even though they are falling towards the
Earth, they're going so fast that as
they fall towards the Earth, the Earth's
surface curves away from them and
therefore they never get any closer. So
the space station and the astronauts
inside are constantly accelerating
towards the Earth's center, but they
never get any closer. And because both
objects are accelerating at the same
rate, the astronauts feel weightless.
They have this amazing sensation of
floating.