If a stone is dropped from a balloon on a still day, does the stone fall directly below the balloon, or to the west or east of it?
For reasons given, the stone falls to the East. But, the estimates have ranged from 6 feet to 6 meters, so I tried to pin it down little better. In the solutions posted, the 6 ft calculation used a 1.6 km drop altitude and the 6 m calculation considered a drop from a balloon at 2 km. However, most nations generally limit everyday manned balloons flights to altitudes bellow 1 km. Also, air resistance, going as (v^2 A),
will be a factor all the way down. E.g, if dropped from 1 km, the stone will just achieve its terminal velocity of 120 mph. The math, simple physics including air resistance, can be solved in closed form, but happily, I found an
app that did it for me, and it gives the derivations too.
For inputs to the app, I used a hardball-sized stone (r=2.7 cm, rho=2.7 gm/cm^3) which is dropped in air of density 1.16 kg/m^3.
(The range of possible densities, 1.11 - 1.26 kg/m^3, makes less than a 1/2 sec total time difference.
For the stone V relative to the ground, I used:
V = V(lat0) [(6371+alt)/6371 - 1] cos(lat), where V(lat0) = 460m/s.
Below are listed the landing offsets for a range of altitudes and latitudes:
Stone Displacement (w/air) (m) descent time (s) V(m/s)
lat: 90 70 30 0(deg) (w/air) (w/o air)* (wrt Earth)
alt --------------------------------- ----------------- -------
300(m) 0.0m 0.07 0.17 0.19 9.0s 7.8s 0.022m/s
500(m) 0.0 0.16 0.40 0.46 12.7 10.1 0.036
1000(m) 0.0 0.53 1.34 1.55 21.5 14.3 0.072
1600(m)** 0.0 1.26 3.20 3.70 32.0 27.9 0.116
2000(m)** 0.0 1.93 4.88 5.63 39.0 34.9 0.144
----------------------------------------------------------------------
notes: *(not used), **(unlikely)
From this table, a 1 km high stone would land displaced by 4.6 feet.
Comparing this table with the previous (rougher) estimates, if the balloon had indeed been a mile high, air resistance would have caused a longer descent (32 s vs 18 s) and a displacement of 12 ft, as shown in the table.
Had the balloon been dropped from 2 km, the long descent would land it 5.6 m displaced. This agrees with the 6 meter value posted, but the agreement was in part due to a fortunate canceling of an underestimate of descent time (30 vs 39 s) and an overestimate of relative velocities (0.20 vs 0.14 m/s).
Nonetheless - the previous estimates were pretty good!
Edited on September 26, 2022, 9:19 pm