You have been hired to check the technical correctness of an upcoming made for t

Question

You have been hired to check the technical correctness of an upcoming made for tv murder mystery. The mystery takes place in a space shuttle. In one scene, an astronauts safety line is sabotaged while she is on a space walk, so she is no longer connected to the space station. She checks and finds her thrusters are also damaged and not working. She is 200 meters from the shuttle and moving with it. That is she is not moving in respect to the shuttle. There she is drifting in space with 4 minutes of oxygen left. To get back to the shuttle she decides to unstrap her 10 kg tool kit and trows it at a speed of 8m/s. In the script she she survives, but is that correct? her mass including the space suit is 80 kg

Explanation / Answer

Negative velocities are acceptable. Remember, a velocity is a vector so it can be positive or negative. In this case, it just means your moving in the opposite direction (assuming you picked the toolbelt to travel in the positive direction). Of course if you're adding 2 numbers together to get 0 and the mass is always positive, one definitely needs to be negative. The problem looks correct. Also, the kit and her do NOT move in the same direction. If that were the case, momentum would not be conserved. But say everything is stationary, then she throws the kit, doesn't that cause her to move in the same direction as the throwing movement pulls her forward? I can't really visualize this. Also, can you expand on why those 2 things moving in same direction would not result in the conservation of momentum? I really need to understand this topic. This is going to be an easy problem compared to the questions our grade 12 teacher puts on the test.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse Y
• Subjects

---

---

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.