Question

Travel to Mars is high up on NASA’s long-term agenda. One of the main issues will be the travel time, which is considerably longer than travel to the Moon. Estimate the travel time to Mars in months adopting a distance of 193 million kilometres between Mars and Earth. Hint: suppose a Hohmann transfer orbit were used with a configuration in which Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the Sun.

Answer 1

A Hohmann Transfer is half of an elliptical orbit that touches the circular orbit the spacecraft is currently on and the circular orbit the spacecraft will end up on . It takes two accelerations to get the original orbit to the destination orbit. To move from a smaller circular orbit to a larger one the spacecraft will need to speed up to get onto the elliptical orbit at the perigee and speed up again at the apogee to get onto the new circular orbit. To move from a larger circluar orbit to a smaller one, the processes are reversed.first since we know that the two objects which is mars andd the sun are the opposite side of the sun so we draw a circular orbit from the earth to the mars and then we use the keeplers third law to find the time of the flight we used the radius of that transfer orbit in the equation and in the units a.u. to avoid big calculations.we get answer in the years then converted into the months