Reply To: What if?

Davis wrote:

They have also discovered some cañons that are up to 10km deep (6miles). Imagine bungee jumping down one of those mega deep canyons. I don’t even know how different the experience would be with less gravity/pressure. I assume you’ll fall more slowly and bounce back less dramatically? Maybe a sciency person here can help with that one? I suppose with temperatures below -200ºC that the bungee cord would snap?

I’m curious about that feature up by one o’clock on the disk of Charon, it looks like a deep groove along a polar line of latitude. Is it an image processing artifact or did something do this in the distant past?

The gravity there is very low, a ten km fall would take a lot longer. There’s not enough atmosphere for there to be a meaningful terminal velocity. If you were there and jumped off, after a second your speed would be less than a foot per second. (On earth, you’d be falling at 32 feet per second after the first second). Charon’s gravity is 0.278 meters per second per second, while Earth’s is about 9.8 meters per second per second.

Plugging into various formulae that come out of physics class, to fall ten kilometers on Charon would require 268 seconds (on earth it would require 45 seconds, and that’s if you aren’t slowed down by atmospheric drag). After 268 seconds, you’d be traveling at 268 * 0.278 = 74.5 meters per second, or 268 kilometers per hour. (Hmm, the number 268 shows up twice, but I think it’s coincidence). Impact would almost certainly be lethal. The speed on earth after a fall like that (again, without drag) would be 1588 kph, which is over the speed of sound (in our atmosphere), and that impact would definitely be lethal.

The bungee cord would have to be specially made to withstand the cold. Anything we use here would almost certainly be brittle at those temperatures. I have no idea if we even know of a material that would behave like rubber at that temperature.