Contents at a glance
- Problem
- Attempted solution
- Trying again
- End matter
- References
Problem
“Imagine that you are on a space walk outside a vessel coasting through interstellar space. You have launched a reference probe that is perfectly stationary relative to the ship, equipped with precision laser velocity measuring devices. A meteoroid approaches at 4.0 m/s, strikes the ship, and bounces off in exactly the opposite direction at 2.0 m/s.
You grab the meteoroid, take it into the ship, put it into an inertial mass meter, and find out that it masses 1.0 kg. The ship’s mass is 20,000 kg without you on board. You know that the impact has caused the space ship to start moving relative to the probe in the same direction the meteoroid was originally traveling.
What will the probe indicate as the magnitude of the ship’s post-collision velocity vector? Express the answer in millimeters per second (mm/s).” — (Gibiliseo 2007, p. 31)
Attempted solution
Like with any physics problem, I proceeded to go about solving this problem by sketching out its description by hand. Figure 1 depicts how I imagined the problem to look like:
