posted 10-03-2010 05:17 PM               

Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard famously took a golf ball along with him to the Moon, making him the first person to play golf on another world. But just how far did his shot travel? One physicist has the answer.

After taking his second shot, Shepard observed the ball seemed to travel for "miles and miles and miles." Theoretical astrophysicist and ScienceBlogs writer Ethan Siegel put this claim to the test, calculating just how far you could send a golf ball flying in the airless, reduced gravity environment of the Moon.

He found that, assuming the golfing astronaut knew how to adjust his approach to properly take advantage of the Moon's environment, he could easily hit the ball 2.5 miles. Perhaps even more amazingly, the ball would likely stay in the air for about 70 seconds before finally coming to a rest. Shepard's shot likely wasn't quite perfect enough to make it that far, but he probably was right in his initial observation that the ball went over a mile into the distance.

Indeed, considering Earth's longest golf shot was probably Mike Austin's 515 yard drive in 1974, Shepard almost certainly holds the unofficial record for longest drive in human history.

posted 10-03-2010 05:47 PM               

Ethan, enjoyed your physics lesson about hitting a golf ball off the Moon. At the end you wrote:

Now, if only there were some good way to find that ball in the great sand trap that is the Moon's surface...

Your write-up was picked up by io9.com, where Alasdair Wilkins (copied on this e-mail) noted:

Shepard's shot likely wasn't quite perfect enough to make it that far, but he probably was right in his initial observation that the ball went over a mile into the distance.

In fact, Shepard hit two golf balls and the location of both are known. One was even photographed after being hit. Neither traveled anywhere close to a mile.

The first ball, which he described as going "Miles and miles and miles" landed in what came to be known as Javelin crater. It was photographed through the window of the lunar module before the astronauts left the surface of the Moon.

You can see the golf ball laying just south of the 'javelin' which gave the small crater its name. The 'javelin' was the Solar Wind Collector staff, which fellow moonwalker Ed Mitchell threw as a make-shift javelin.

In a post-flight interview, Alan Shepard said the second ball he hit fell near where they deployed Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package, or ALSEP.

You can see the layout of the Apollo 14 landing site as as overlay of the imagery taken from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in 2009.

The ALSEP was deployed less than 200 meters from the lunar module. 'Javelin' crater is much closer. Here's the full frame shot from the lunar module window.

So we know exactly where one ball is and the general vicinity of the other, neither having traveled miles...

posted 10-04-2010 02:18 AM               

This activity raised queries as to the feasible distance a golf ball could be struck. I am informed by a mathematician, also a keen golfer, that assuming a speed off the club of 1200 f.p.s., which is average, and an elevation of 40 degrees, which is usual for a 6 iron, then a distance in the order of 900 yards could be expected. Of course, this is for an average golfer. A Nicklaus could be capable of much further, but Shepard, one handed and restricted by a spacesuit could have managed about 300 yards.

posted 02-04-2011 07:10 PM               

This Super Bowl Sunday marks a big anniversary for an event in sports that was truly out of this world. It happened on the moon.

Forty years ago this Sunday, Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell took an entirely different kind of "giant leap for mankind," playing sports on the lunar surface.

Shepard famously hit golf balls with a modified six-iron, and Mitchell threw a javelin. All these years later, the images of their fun on the moon are almost as closely associated with the Apollo moon program as the lunar rover...

posted 02-04-2021 10:58 AM               

But imaging specialist Andy Saunders has digitally enhanced recent high-resolution scans of the original photographic film, and applied a stacking technique on smaller 16mm "movie" footage shot by the crew, and managed to locate the second ball and work out how far it actually went...

"We can now fairly accurately determine that ball number one travelled 24 yards, and ball number two travelled 40 yards," says Cheshire-based Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to mark the anniversary.

"Unfortunately, even the impressive second shot could hardly be described as 'miles and miles and miles', but of course this has only ever been regarded as a light-hearted exaggeration."