In: Physics
You and your team get a distress call from another ship
indicating that there has been an explosion and their propulsion
and navigation systems are now off line. A large piece of their
ship has been jettisoned into space, and their life support systems
are failing. They need help as soon as possible. You try to track
them, but are only able to pick up the piece of the craft that had
been projected away from them in the explosion. You look up the
make and model of their ship, a Galaxy Explorer 5000 (GE 5000),
which has a total mass of 52000 kg. The piece heading in your
direction is the ship’s storage module, and has a mass of 9000
kg.
The GE 5000 was at rest with respect to your ship at the time of
the explosion.
(a) Assuming you received the distress call 20
minutes before the jettisoned storage module passed by your ship at
a speed of 630 m/s, what is the speed of the damaged craft?
(b) How far away is the Galaxy Explorer 5000 when
its storage module passes by?
(c) In which direction, and how fast must you go,
in order to catch up with the GE 5000 before its life support
systems fail. (The crew had 80 minutes of life support left when
they made the distress call, so you have 60 minutes to get to
them.)