How Do You Measure Big Forces, like Space Rocket Thrust, Accurately?
An apple weighs around one newton while the Saturn 3 rocket that launched people to the moon had a thrust of around 33, 360,000 newtons. Which is a lot, but how do we measure forces like that which are so big? Well one way is the deadweight machine at the lab of the The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Last year they re-opened their million pound weight (that’s 4, 448, 222 newtons) machine, which is the largest in the world.
It performs force calibrations for US aerospace manufacturers and US military labs and in this video Veritasium looks under the bonnet to see how it works.
Comments