Planet Puzzle

Your Name:

Your Teacher: Class Time:

Your warp drive fails while rushing to the starbase near 61 Cygni A. Seeking dilithium, you use remaining impulse power to approach an uncharted planet which is mostly covered with oceans. With a mass of 2.8 times Earth's mass, the planet is more massive than Earth. The planet is larger than Earth: its radius is 1.4 times the Earth's radius.

Klingons are able to work under adverse conditions including gravitational pulls of up to 7.3 times that of Earth (Earth surface has g=9.8 m/s² ).

Can you beam the Klingons down to the surface to search for dilithium or should you attempt to find dilithium from orbit and then beam the dilithium aboard?

Send the Klingons down
Work from orbit

Your away team should expect a surface gravitational pull of times that on the surface of Earth. (Your answer should include 3 significant digits!)

Explain how you figured out your answer:

You might want to hit the "Reload" button a few times to see that the problems changes every time it is accessed. You might also want to use the Netscape "View" menu to look at the "Document Source"...i.e., exactly what was sent to your browser. Note the hidden variables!

Ignore the below; I'm just showing you what a SHOW looks like:

Variables:

a= .000000000000000 b= .000000000000000 c= .000000000000000
x= .000000000000000 y= .000000000000000 z= .000000000000000

show= 1.0000000000000000

F(X)=X

R = 1.40000000000000
M = 2.80000001788139

Grading Variables:

nquest= 0 nright= 0 nblank= 0 right= 0
n_quest= 0 n_right= 0 n_blank= 0 right_= 0

Special Variables:

seed= -2147483648 pid= 270928