Can you fire a gun on the moon

In reference to "Can I fire a gun on the moon? First, we know that the bullet has the same initial velocity on the Moon as it does on the Earth - that is, it exits the gun at the same speed. But as soon as it leaves the gun, it's a different story. First, the Moon bullet doesn't have to contend with air resistance. With so little friction, it can maintain its speed longer than the Earth bullet can.

It's analogous to shooting a hockey puck across ice, which has very little friction, and shooting across sand, which has a lot of friction. The puck will travel a lot farther on the ice! Now, there is the issue of gravity. Assuming your bullet doesn't hit anything a pretty safe bet on the Moon, but don't try this on Earth! You can use some basic physics to figure out how far the bullet will fly horizontally and vertically.

It turns out that the bullet's horizontal range - the total distance it travels before gravity wrestles it to the ground - is given by the equation:. On Earth, it is 9. To find g on the Moon, we need another equation:.

G is the gravitational constant , M is the mass of the Moon , and R is the radius of the Moon. Anyway, on the Moon,. So, neglecting air resistance, the bullet will go about 6 times farther on the Moon than on Earth.

Once you take air resistance into account, the Moon bullet has an even bigger advantage! You might also ask, if the bullet were fired straight up, could it actually escape the moon's gravitational pull and fly off into space? To answer this, we have to compare the moon's "escape velocity" the minimum velocity an object needs to escape the Moon's gravity to the bullet's initial velocity.

The moon's escape velocity is about 2. So take cover - even in this case, what goes up must come down! With more than a decade of experience as a science writer, Kate Becker has written on a wide variety of science and science policy subjects for web, print, radio, and television, with an emphasis on astronomy and physics. She studied physics at Oberlin College and astronomy at Cornell University, and she's had the good fortune to observe with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Very Large Array in New Mexico, two of the very best places on this pale blue dot of a planet.

Website: www. What happens to a bullet fired on the Moon? Intermediate In reference to "Can I fire a gun on the moon? You have two options. You either can spend all of eternity trying to figure out how you got there, or you can shoot the damn cosmos. If you do the latter, Newton's third law of motion dictates that the force exerted on the bullet will impart an equal and opposite force on the gun, and, because you're holding the gun, you.

If the bullet leaves the gun barrel at 1, meters per second, you — because you're much more massive than it is — will head the other way at only a few centimeters per second. Once shot, the bullet will keep going, quite literally, forever. If the universe weren't expanding, then the one or two atoms per cubic centimeter encountered by the bullet in the near-vacuum of space would bring it to a standstill after 10 million light-years.

Getting down to details, the universe expands at a rate of 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec about 3 million light-years, or the average distance between galaxies.

By Cuk's calculations, this means matter that is 40, to 50, light-years away from the bullet would move away from it at about the same speed at which it is travelling, and would thus be forever out of reach.

In the entire future of the universe, the bullet will catch up only to atoms that are less than 40, or so light-years from the chamber of your gun. Related: In images: Visualizations of infinity. Guns do actually get carried to space, though not quite to the void between galaxies. For decades, the standard survival pack for Russian cosmonauts has included a gun. Until recently, it wasn't just any gun, but "a deluxe all-in-one weapon with three barrels and a folding stock that doubles as a shovel and contains a swing-out machete," according to space historian James Oberg.

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