Does mass affect the acceleration due to gravity?
Only the mass of Earth (or mass of other body of greatest influence), distance to the Earth’s center (or distance to other body of greatest influence), and non-gravitational illusions due to the Earth’s rotation will affect the effective gravitational field. The mass of the body of interest has no influence on how much it accelerates downward as it falls, due to a great coincidence of mass causing both the property of matter of inertia and the force of gravity. Friction, air drag, or what ever you want to call it, is irrelevant to stating the “acceleration due to gravity”. Those effects are completely different forces. Whether there is or isn’t air drag, the effective gravitational field is unaffected. Anytime we speak of “acceleration due to gravity”, we are specifically speaking of the acceleration which the body will have should no other forces come in to play. “Acceleration due to gravity” and “gravitational field strength” are nearly synonym terms…although “gravitational field s
