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Extra Credit Project: Nanogravity probe

This project must be done by individuals. You must hand in a printed copy of your work to me by scheduled time, or place it in the mailbox outside my office door.

You are in charge of designing a spacecraft which will investigate certain chemical processes under conditions of nanogravity. What that means is that all the instruments and chemicals must be part of an almost perfectly inertial frame. The relative accelerations of any two objects within the laboratory must be no more than one-billionth the acceleration of objects due to gravity at the Earth's surface.

In other words, condider two iron balls of mass m = 1 kg at opposite ends of the lab, Compute the overall gravitational force on ball A, due to the gravitational forces from planets and the Sun; call it FA; compute the overall force on ball B; call it FB. In order to achieve nano-gravity, we require

Some of the reactions you plan to study will take many hours or even days to complete, so you can't simply drop them down a deep mineshaft here on Earth. No, you'll have to send everything into space.

The question is, where must the lab go? Here are some constraints you must satisfy.

Is it possible to satisfy all these conditions? If yes, explain where you would send the lab. If no, explain why it is impossible.


This page maintained by Michael Richmond. Last modified Dec 14, 2015.

Creative Commons License Copyright © Michael Richmond. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.