Skip to main content

This crazy skydiver just jumped from 7,600 metres without a parachute

Image
By
skydiver- just -jumped- from- 7,600- metres- without -a- parachute http://www.woobleweb.com/
An American skydiver has become the first person in the world to purposefully jump out of a plane at 7,620 metres (25,000 feet) without a parachute - and survive.
Instead, 42-year-old Luke Aikins used a huge, 20-storey-high net to break his fall, after hurtling towards the ground at around 241 km/h (150 mph).
The stunt took 18 months and a whole lot of careful calculations to pull off - most importantly, a team of researchers had to make sure that the net was perfectly designed to slow Aikins down enough so he that wouldn't hit the ground, but not break his fall so quickly that it injured him.
"Pay attention to the science and the math behind this. And we'll show you what's possible," said Aikins in the live-broadcast of the jump, which landed him in Simi Valley, California.
Aikins hasn't revealed exactly what material his net was made out of, but it was specially designed to be able to support the impact of his fall, while stretching enough to trap Aikins and stop him from bouncing straight back out again.

The 30 x 30 metre (100 x 100 feet) net - around the third of the size of a football field - was supported by four 61-metre-high (200-feet) cranes, putting it at a height of around 20 storeys.
There was also a second net below the first one, presumably in case something went wrong.
While free-falling through the air (something he'd done more than 18,000 times before this with a parachute), Aikins was guided by a high-tech system that showed him red lights on the landing site if he was off course, and green lights when he was heading in the right direction.
He was able to control his direction by angling his body against the wind - something that comes from years of practice.
His helmet also beeped faster as he headed closer to the centre of the net, and slower as he moved away from it.
He completed the jump face-down, before flipping onto his back at the last minute to land more gently. Within a few minutes he was up and hugging his family.
Before the stunt, he'd only trialled jumping into the net from 26 metres (87 feet), and according to NPR, he was originally going to wear a parachute as a back-up. But he changed his mind and took it off before jumping.
"I'm almost levitating, it's incredible," Aikins told the press after the jump.
He's not the first person to risk his life for science. Earlier this year, Norwegian physicist Andreas Wahl jumped off a building and had a gun shot at him to demonstrate the laws of physics.

And while we're always happy to see people putting their trust in science, let's all make a pact right now to never, ever try any of these stunts at home. Thank you.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team Work - Meaning and Tips for better Team Work

By
A single brain is not always capable of making key decisions on its own. To come up with an efficient solution, an individual requires the help and advice of others. A team is established when individuals get together on a common platform with the common goal of completing a task. To guarantee optimum compatibility, team members should ideally come from similar backgrounds and have a single aim. To provide their best, the team members must complement each other and function as a single unit in tight cooperation. "There is no I in Team Work," as the saying goes, and each member must put the needs of his team first. Personal interests must take a second seat. Any team's performance is directly proportionate to the relationship between its members and their combined efforts. What is the definition of teamwork? Teamwork is defined as the sum of each team member's efforts toward the fulfilment of the team's goal. In other words, any team's backbone is its ability t
Post a Comment
Read more

Scientists discover a new theory / The fundamental property of light – 150 years after Maxwell

By
Light plays a vital role in our everyday lives and technologies based on light are all around us. So we might expect that our understanding of light is pretty settled. But scientists have just uncovered a new fundamental property of light that gives new insight into the 150-year-old classical theory of electromagnetism and which could lead to applications manipulating light at the nanoscale. It is unusual for a pure-theory physics paper to make it into the journal Science. So when one does, it’s worth a closer look. In the new study, researchers bring together one of physics' most venerable set of equations – those of James Clerk’s Maxwell’s famous theory of light – with one of the hot topics in modern solid-state physics: the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators . To understand what the fuss is about, let’s first consider the behaviour of electrons in the quantum spin Hall effect. Electrons possess an intrinsic spin as if they were tiny spinning-tops,
Post a Comment
Read more

19 Types Of Content Writing Services For Your Business

By
  It’s hard to know which type of content writing service is the best for your business.  There are so many  different types of content writing services  out there that it’s easy to get confused. You end up wondering if you’re choosing the right one for you. In this post, we’ll get rid of this confusion, once and for all. I’m going to list out the different kinds of writing services you could use.  By the end of this article, you’ll know whether you need a copywriter, a content writer, or a social media marketer and how they can help you achieve your business goals. This post is also useful for writers who want to hone their writing skills in a specific area. Let’s dive in and learn what types of content writing services exist and when you should use them. (Bonus – if you want to  hire the top 1%  of writers, go to the bottom to learn how). Types of Content Writing Services As we go through the list of content writing services, you will find that many of them overlap. That’s perfectly
Post a Comment
Read more