Apollo 15 Experiment
Dropping a Feather and a Hammer
At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott (pictured above) performed a live demonstration for the television cameras. He held out a geologic hammer and a feather and dropped them at the same time. Because they were essentially in a vacuum, there was no air resistance and the feather fell at the same rate as the hammer. As Gallileo had concluded hundreds of years before - all objects released together fall at the same rate, regardless of mass.