3 minute read

A smartphone plunging through Earth's atmosphere from space, encountering air resistance and heating up on the way down. A smartphone plunging through Earth’s atmosphere from space, encountering air resistance and heating up on the way down.

The wild science behind a falling phone

By Peter Teoh, Science Writer

Imagine this: you accidentally drop your phone—not just from your hand, or a tall building, but all the way from space! What would happen to it as it plummets toward Earth? Would it survive the fall? Could it even cause damage when it hits the ground?

The Journey Begins: Gravity Takes Over

When an object is dropped from space, gravity immediately pulls it toward Earth, accelerating it faster and faster. This means your phone would start falling at an incredible speed, gaining velocity as it falls through the vacuum of space—where there is no air to slow it down.

Enter the Atmosphere: The Invisible Brake

But as your phone reaches Earth’s atmosphere, things get interesting. The atmosphere is filled with air molecules that push back against falling objects. This push is called air resistance or drag. As the phone speeds up, drag increases until it balances the force of gravity pulling it down. When these two forces are equal, the phone stops accelerating and continues falling at a constant speed called the terminal velocity.

For a smartphone, this terminal velocity is around 60 miles per hour (about 27 meters per second)[1]. This is much slower than you might expect, considering the phone started falling from thousands of kilometers up!

Heating Up: The Fiery Descent?

You may have heard about meteors burning up as they enter the atmosphere. That’s because meteors are often traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, generating extreme friction with air molecules that causes heat and glowing trails.

Your phone, however, falls much slower. Its terminal velocity is too low to create the kind of intense heat that burns meteors. So, it won’t vaporize or explode in a fireball. It might get a bit warm from air friction, but not enough to melt or burn.

Impact: Will It Survive the Crash?

Now the big question: Will your phone survive hitting the ground?

It depends on many factors:

  • Surface type: Phones dropped even from planes sometimes survive if they land on soft surfaces like grass or snow rather than hard asphalt or concrete[1][5].
  • Angle of impact: How the phone hits the ground can cause different damage; landing flat versus on a corner can change the outcome[3].
  • Phone durability: Modern phones are tougher than you might think. Cases and screen materials have improved a lot.

There have even been real cases where phones fell from planes at high altitudes—over 4,500 meters (about 15,000 feet)—and still worked when found on the ground[5]. This shows that while your phone would likely get damaged, total destruction is not guaranteed.

Could a Falling Phone Be Dangerous?

Even though a phone falls slower than you might guess, it can still hit the ground at around 60 mph, which is fast enough to cause injury if it struck a person. So, while it’s unlikely your phone would be a deadly projectile, it’s definitely not something you’d want falling on your head!

Bonus: Why Phones Sometimes Crash Even Without Falling

Interestingly, your phone’s electronics can be affected by cosmic rays—high-energy particles from space that can cause glitches or crashes[4]. So, while your phone is in space or high altitudes, it might experience tiny malfunctions caused by these invisible space particles.

Side Notes

  • Terminal velocity: The constant speed a falling object reaches when gravity and air resistance balance out.
  • Cosmic rays: Energetic particles from space that can interfere with electronic devices.
  • Real-life stories of phones surviving extreme falls give us clues about the surprising durability of everyday tech.
  • Mark Rober’s experiment: Former NASA engineer Mark Rober dropped an egg from near-space altitude to study terminal velocity and impact forces[1].
  • Phones on other planets? Ever wondered how phones would survive falling on planets with different atmospheres? Videos test such hypotheticals[2].
  • The mystery of cracked screens: Why do phones sometimes shatter from small drops but survive huge falls? It’s all about impact angle and surface[3].

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