Subject:
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Re: 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 22:03:12 GMT
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Viewed:
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235 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Steve Bliss writes:
> 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
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.
But what about deceleration? :) Wouldn't a ship need to spend half of its
time accelerating and half of its time decelerating?
Figure ½s=½a(½t)², which gives t = ~43 hours. Wow, you could go there for
an extended weekend. :)
--Todd
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Transit Time to Mars
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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 (...) (25 years ago, 15-Dec-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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