Subject:
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Transit Time to Mars
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Wed, 15 Dec 1999 21:44:21 GMT
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Viewed:
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159 times
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Basic physics word problem, which I thought of because of NASA's publicity about
renewed Mars exploration, and putting people on Mars:
If a spaceship could accelerate at a constant rate of 1G, how long would it take
to get safely to Mars?
Assume the distance to Mars is 36 million miles.
Show your work. ;)
I worked out an answer to this, but it was too low to believe.
Steve
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Message has 5 Replies:
 | | Re: Transit Time to Mars
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| (...) Wow, cool, I get just over 1 day (~30 hours), which is probably short enough to ignore the fact that the source and target are both moving. I used s=½at² and solved for t. For s I used 5.8 x 10^10 m (36 x 10^6 miles) and for a I used 9.8 m/s². (...) (25 years ago, 15-Dec-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
| | | Re: Transit Time to Mars
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| (...) about (...) take (...) if you thought THAT was amazing, try it to Pluto... or to Alpha Centauri! RAH (1) did a science fact article on this, way before most of us were born. It drives home how fast you can go if you can just keep accelerating. (...) (25 years ago, 15-Dec-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
| | | Re: Transit Time to Mars
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| (...) Assume that a mile is 1.6 km, because dammit, you don't calculate these things in imperial (you'd need g in miles/sec. Ugh.) (...) All right. x == v0 * t + 0.5 * a * t x == 57.6e9 m v0 == 0 (this means I'm calculating from reaching orbit, (...) (25 years ago, 16-Dec-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
| | | Re: Transit Time to Mars
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| Steve Bliss wrote (...) It's not. And also it's not a straight line, nor is it flat. At best, you could slingshot off the moon with a grazing orbit (about 100m at perihelion, and hit atmosphere in less than 24 hours I think. Only once per orbit, and (...) (25 years ago, 16-Dec-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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