"Michael S. Lorrey" <mlorrey@datamann.com> gave me the formulas and
told me to do the math.
Oh shoot, I thought someone would do the math for me.
We'll thanks for the formulas and the distance.
OK, see If I have this right:
45,000,000 * 5280 = 237,600,000,000 ft
(half way point in feet when planets are nearest each other)
32 t^2
------ = 237,600,000,000 ft
2
t^2 = 14,850,000,000
t =~ 121,860 seconds
8640 seconds/day
t =~ 14 days
How convinient! So that gives 2 weeks when the planets are nearest
each other to get half way there and up to full speed which would be:
V = t*a
V = 121860 * 32 ft/sec
V = 3,899,520 ft/sec
V = 738 miles/sec
V = 2,658,763 miles/hour
Then another 2 weeks to slow down and travel the second half of the
distance for a total of 4 weeks.
That would make me guess that doing the trip twice that fast
(2 weeks instead of 4) would put someone near a constant 2 g
acceleration the entire trip (or is it non linear or something?) I'd
bet this would be kind of hard to endure, yet likely possible for a
very fit person. (imagine how fit he'd be after arriving on Mars which
has around .5 g right? ;) It would be more or less impossible for a
non modified human to do much faster than 2 weeks right?
What a trip that would be to do it in 2 weeks! How much more
would a twin brother staying at home have aged than you after having
made such a round trip to Mars and back? Or is this not yet enough
acceleration to make a significant difference? How much time at 1 or
2 Gs does it take to make a difference?
Brent Allsop
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:16 MDT