Santa’s sleigh is one amazing machine. Can you imagine how Santa Claus could manage to deliver gifts to million of houses all over the world without it?Your Science teacher has probably already told you that Reindeers can’t fly. But we here at the Science Centrum can’t help but wonder: what DOES it take to make Santa’s sleigh fly? How does Santa know where to go? And could the reindeers themselves move the sleigh, or do they get a little bit of help from science? We’ll never really know for sure, since nobody here has ever seen Santa Claus (despite our best efforts to stay up late and wait for him). But we’ve rounded up a few questions that may be on your minds on how Santa successfully makes millions of kids around the world happy every year on Christmas day. How does Santa know where to go? Santa would probably have a really high-tech Global Positioning System (GPS) navigator, which shows him on a map where he is exactly and maps out his routes for him. Most smart phones now have this feature, which makes it all the more probable that Santa uses this gadget too! How does Santa’s Reindeers fly? And won’t they get tired of pulling the sleigh? You mean Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and, most famously, Rudolph? Well, we suspect that their antlers have something to with it. They could be devices that create wormholes in space, which allow them to take shortcuts that make their trip faster. The reindeers would also have flight simulation training every year before Christmas to make sure that they’re in excellent shape before their round-the-world trip. How fast would Santa’s sleigh be travelling? For Santa to deliver all the Christmas presents in time, his sleigh should be travelling at around 10,703,437.5 kilometers per hour (km/h) or about 1,800 miles per second (without the wormholes that we suggested earlier). That’s way faster than the Voyager 1 space probe, the fastest man-made object in history! But don’t worry about Santa going up in flames because of the air resistance created when flying at high speeds: Santa’s sleigh would have an invisible force field around it that protects him, the sleigh and all his reindeers from getting fried. How heavy is his sleigh? And how do all the gifts fit inside? It is quite curious, isn’t it? We think that the millions of gifts themselves would weigh probably around 416,000 tonnes (that’s like putting thousands of trucks inside Santa’s sleigh!). Add that to the weight of the sleigh itself and the Reindeers, which is probably around 816,00 tonnes, and you have one really heavy sleigh. And since Santa only has nine Reindeers, it would be then physically impossible for him to carry all the gifts in his sleigh at one time. The solution? Santa’s red sack can actually teleport gifts between his workshop in the North Pole (with the help of the elves) and his sleigh, so he would only need to carry the extra-special gifts with him, which cuts down on the weight.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 02:43:20 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015