Question

1. Space travel is expensive! For their trip to the Moon, the Apollo astronauts' living quarters were only 213 cubic feet (that's smaller than a typical small bathroom in a house). How many dollar bills could fit in there?

The room in the top half of the image is the laboratory. At the lower left is the sleeping area, lower center is bathroom, and lower right is the living area. (Image from NASA).

2.

Would a stack of dollar bills in the amount of the U.S. national debt reach from the Earth to the Moon?

		No, not by a long shot.
		No, but almost.
		Yes, barely.
		Yes, it reaches to the Moon and nearly back to the Earth.
		Yes, it could make the round trip to the Moon and back twice with enough bills left over to return to the Moon a third time.

3. Pluto has been hard to measure from Earth because of its atmosphere. In 2007 Young, Young, and Buie measured Pluto as having a diameter of 2322 km. In 2015 the New Horizons probe reached Pluto and measured it up close and we now know the actual diameter is 2372 km. What was the percent error of the 2007 measurement?

Enter your answer as a percent, with a negative value if the 2007 measurement was too small and a positive value if it was too large.

Answer 1

Answer:)

a.)

The dimensions of a typical dollar bill are 2.61 inches x 6.14 inches x 0.0043 inches. The volume of such a dollar bill is then :

Thus, a total of

would fit in that room.

b.)

We will only be concerned in the linear distance to the moon, and thus only the thickness would carry us forward towards the moon from the Earth. Also, we need that the US National Debt has a rough value of 22 Trillion dollars (22,000,000,000,000), and that the moon is 15.13 billion″ away from the Earth on average, roughly. Then, we see that:

distance traversed by stack of bills = 22000000000000 * 0.0043 = 94600000000

Thus, we see that the distance traversed by the stack of bills is 94.6 billion'', and thus, the stack would make the round trip to the Moon and back twice with enough bills left over to return to the Moon a third time.

c.) The percentage error is defined as follows;

This indicates that the 2007 value was lesser than the actual value that 2015 gave.