![]() (Unless the asteroid is passing close by a black hole or some other body with a very steep gradient of gravity.)įurthermore, I'm quite sceptical of an astronaut being able to jump off the shuttle and fall into Earths atmosphere in any reasonable circumstances. In any case, I'd guess that a large enough asteroid to be solid enough to jump off of would have enough gravity to pull you back. It follows that the difference between free fall and zero gravity is physically irrelevant.Īlso, I quite doubt that jumping off an asteroid could take you to the Sun or onto a planet, unless the asteroid is also on a collision course with the same body. In any case, Einstein argued in his famous theory that effects of gravity are independent to those caused by acceleration. They could get away from the spacecraft because it has very weak gravity and since it is near earth (which has more gravity), they eventually fall into earth.Īfter all I have told you, if you really want to experience zero-gravity, you would have to rig the laws of our universe.īringing my nitpickerplucker to bear, saying there's no place without gravity is much like rooting for the centripetal force in favour of the centrifugal. ![]() If they jump by kicking the spacecraft, and if their rotten luck has it that they are untethered, they'll jump all the way into earth (and burn up as they enter). They are in orbit around earth along with the craft when they do their spacewalk (spacewalk is a charmingly earth-centric misnomer, it's mostly free-floating and firing tiny rockets on their backpack). If you are lucky, the asteroid may be near the Sun, in which case you can go blazing into the Sun like Marvin, the paranoid android in Douglas Adams novel.Ī more visual example would be spacewalking astronauts. If you are near a planet when jumping off the asteroid, you'll probably fall into the planet as it would slowly but surely pull you in. That's because the asteroid has a very weak gravitational field. How far would you (or your dead body) go? Quite far. Suppose, you land on an Asteriod and it looks desolate that you get suicidal and jump off. If you jump one feet on earth, you can jump six feet on the moon. If we rate earth's gravity as one, then the force is six times weaker on moon (gravity is proportional to mass). So, what if we jump where there's very very weak gravity? However, there are places with very very weak gravity. The place with no gravity is infinitely far away because the force of gravity - although it weakens as we get far away from its source - never becomes zero. ![]() If there is such a place it is infinitely far away and we'll never get there. There is no place where there's zero gravity. Well, that's a great question (and you are very pretty, of course). The wife asked, what if we jump and there's no gravity? You are the science dude.
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