Question

1a. You wake up one morning to find yourself in a strange room with opaque walls, and no visible doors or windows. You decide to do some experiments to find out more about your strange situation. Your own body mass is 60.4 kg. You pick up an object and drop it from rest, starting at a height of 1.64 meters above the floor, and it hits the floor 0.289 seconds later. You can ignore air resistance. Based on the outcome of this experiment, when you step on the scale provided for you, what weight will it register for your body?

b. The NEXT morning, you wake up in a strange room yet again, and this time you drop a ball from a height of 1.80 m above the floor. The ball hits the floor 0.242 s after your drop it. You guess that you must have been taken to an alien planet with gravity different from Earth s. What is this planet s g (that is, the magnitude of the acceleration due to gravity on this planet)?

c. Here we go again (yes, this set of questions is starting to feel like Groundhog Day). You AGAIN wake up in a strange room, and this time you drop a ball from a height of 1.34 m, and observe that it hits the floor 0.261 s after you drop it. In this case you suspect you are in deep space, far from any planet or star, and that your rocket is accelerating due to the push of its own engines under the floor. In this case, what must the acceleration of your rocket be?

d. OK, yet another strange awakening in a room with no windows. This time you drop a ball from a height of 2.30 m and it hits the floor 0.548 s after you drop it. This time you suspect you are on a rocket that has just left the surface of the Earth, and is still not too far above the ground. What do you deduce the rocket s acceleration to be?

e. OK, this is the last time for one of these crazy adventures. THIS time, though, there is a window in the floor, and you can see that you re in a rocket which has just taken off from the surface of an alien planet. By taking careful measurements out that window you determine that the rocket is accelerating upward at 7.71 m/s^2. When you drop a ball from a height of 1.73 m, it hits the floor 0.274 s later. What is the value of g for the alien world below you?

Answer 1