REAL LIFE NEWS: FLYING ON TITAN
by Hazed
If you’ve ever wanted to fly like a bird, without the use of engines or propellers, then you need to head to Titan because some students have shown that conditions on the planet would allow human flight.
You’d have to wear a wingsuit to make it work, and you’d need to run as fast as Usain Bolt to get a run up of over 11 metres per second, but those are minor details!
The students from the University of Leicester, England, worked out the calculations in their final year paper for a student paper called the Journal of Physics Special Topics, run by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University. Using the density of air on Titan’s surface, the acceleration due to gravity, and the wing area of an average wingsuit as used by skydivers on Earth they discovered that someone running like Usain Bolt would be able to take off.
For those of us not quite so speedy, the good news is that you can do it with a more sensible running speed of 6 metres per second, but you’d need a wingsuit that had a much bigger surface area – about three times as big. Very cumbersome.
Student Hannah Lerman, 21, from Mill Hill, North London, said: “I had seen a lot of claims online that humans would be able to fly on Titan, but no one had given the physics behind it. I thought it would be interesting to try it with a wingsuit – something that you actually use on earth. It is a really exciting idea that someone like Usain Bolt could actually fly unaided. It would give a whole new dimension to travelling.”
So here’s yet another new sport I should be adding to the Titan map in Fed!
