Has anyone seen a map of Video of Felix Baumgartner’s Supersonic Free Fall - NYTimes.com? The articles all report vertical information. I find nothing about where Baumgartner was horizontally relative to Roswell.
I wonder how the hell they knew where he would land.
Watching it live, they mentioned at one point that he had drifted about 50 miles east towards Texas. I forget when exactly that was - maybe 15-20 min before he jumped. He did land in New Mexico though.
What I found a little disconcerting about the video is that you can hear Felix asking for directions to the landing site over and over but all they can give him is wind direction. I’m not sure that mission control was tracking him very effectively. I guess they were simply relying on visual contact from the helicopters.
The Red Bull Stratos site was providing Lat/Long of the capsule to four decimal places, right up until Felix jumped. I was quite intensely interested, as I was involved in their “guess where Felix will land, and win a $12k watch” contest. I still haven’t heard exactly where he landed, but Internet speculation is that it was somewhere around a few miles south of the 172/ U.S. 380 junction in eastern New Mexico. Without benefit of their advanced winds aloft data—NOAA’s forecast stopped at 39,000 feet—my SWAG was about 10 miles from where I think he ended up. Pure luck.
My heart was in my throat, watching him spin ass over teakettle. Amazing that he was able to arrest his tumble without having to break out the drogue.
Some more guesses/info here: Yahoo Search - Web Search
And at least twice I heard them give him the wrong wind direction - something like ‘‘wind blowing to the east…correction wind coming from the east.’’
This is also strange because when you’re under your parachute it’s really easy to see how the wind is affecting your flight, and thus how to head into wind for landing. Information from someone who’s miles away is of very little interest or value.
I’d like to know at what speed he was traveling when he popped his chute. Have to assume it was far less than 800 mph. And when he started to decelerate, at what rate did he decelerate? At what altitude did he start to slow down? After he jumped was there a point at which there was no sensation of speed?
Has the “pod” come down yet? Where?
This whole thing was amazing.
Months ago I did an Excel spreadsheet simulating his freefall. By my estimates:
-he was traveling at about 150 MPH when he popped his chute.
-he hit his peak speed at an altitude of around 88,000 feet.
-his peak decel rate was about 0.6 g’s. At that point, he felt a wind drag force equivalent to 1.6 times his body weight; factor in gravity pulling down with 1x his body weight, and so a maximum decel rate of 0.6 g’s.
-He would have had very little sensation of speed for a long time; the relative motion of the earth toward him would have been difficult to perceive until he reached lower altitudes, and the wind drag didn’t build up to appreciable levels for a long time, either. Downward acceleration was in excess of 0.8 g’s for the first 30 seconds of his dive (in other words, he perceived something quite close to weightlessness for that length of time).
Shortly after he jumped, the capsule deliberately detached from the gas envelope and came down on its own parachute.
Wow, I made it!
Hey, what’s that shad
CLUNK!
This morning I did a Google News search on Baumgartener and map and got a ghit. The lede even mentioned Roswell. Turns out their “map” was just a chart of vertical distance and speed. Has the result of the contest been announced?
To be fair, the speed and direction of wind can vary from one layer of the atmosphere to another. You probably would not want to rely only on first-hand information.
But he was not being given any detail on winds by altitude - just a simple (and seemingly confused) report of wind strength and direction.
And he was not trying to hit some small target - he was simply trying to land safely and gently in a rather large desert. So the only wind that was truly important was that near the ground.
I don’t know what you people are talking about. I believe everything I see on MSNBC.
Italian neutrinos? Pfff.
OK slight tangent - if he had been traveling that fast, or at least .9999c, how much of the Earth would be left after impact? I’m thinking his parachute wouldn’t make much difference…
Extrapolating this to man-sized and 1000 times closer to c, I’d say he could wipe out the greater part of a medium sized state.
So, we still don’t know exactly ***where ***he landed?
From this post at the Red Bull site, they mention that he landed 43.8 miles away from where he launched. In exactly which direction, they’re still not saying.
A 110kg man (with spacesuit) traveling at .9999c would impact the earth with 4.93x10^18 Joules of kinetic energy, or the equivalent of approximately 1000 megatons of TNT.
According to this calculator, Felix ultimately ends up as a crater about 3.5km in diameter.
Ouch.
Don’t you have to use a relativistic energy calculator for speeds ~c? Plugging the quantities above into this one (no guarantees as to its accuracy) yields a KE about 100 times yours. Which only makes the crater ~5 times as wide. Still sufficient to (WAG) kill everything within ~100 miles or so.
Wish they’d hurry up and give us the landing point already.