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.

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.

the shape of the laboratory is a rectangular box, with length L = 10 m, height H = 4 m and depth D = 4 m
the total mass of the laboratory is M = 5000 kg
ground control must be able to communicate with the lab instruments with a delay of no more than t = 5 hours

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 Sep 14, 2008.