Resumen de Hands-on Experiment for Modeling the Baumgartner Jump Using Free-Fall Kinematics with Drag
Alexander Gössling, Sebastian Becker, Jochen Kuhn
Supersonic free-fall jumps are excellent examples of kinematics in the context of drag. They have attracted a lot of media, public, and scientific interest.1–4 In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a height of approximately 38.969 km. During his flight he reached a top speed of 373 m/s, becoming the first human to travel faster than the speed of sound outside of an airplane.5 Since everyday topics are known to motivate students (e.g., Kuhn and Müller6), the topic of Baumgartner’s jump seems to be very well suited for teaching kinematics in the context of drag.
Our motivation is to recreate the real jump of Baumgartner in a laboratory experiment, combining this interesting topic with hands-on experience using mobile video analysis. The experiment can be performed by students themselves using everyday materials. The data can be acquired and analyzed with video analysis software on a tablet computer. The limitations of this hands-on experiment will be discussed on the basis of quantitative modeling in this paper.
