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Ch 04: Newton's Laws of Motion

Chapter 4, Problem 4

An astronaut's pack weighs 17.5 N when she is on the earth but only 3.24 N when she is at the surface of a moon. (a) What is the acceleration due to gravity on this moon?

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Welcome back everybody. We are told that the ratio of a weight of a person on Mars compared to the weight of that same person on Earth is 0.38. And we are asked to find what the gravitational acceleration on Mars is. Well, we know that the weight of an object on a given planet is equal to its mass times the gravitational acceleration of that planet. Well, the mass on both Earth and MARS is going to be constant, but here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna divide both sides by our gravitational acceleration and we're gonna get that the mass is equal, wait times the gravitational acceleration on a given planet. I'm actually gonna say this right side here is Earth, and since mass is constant, I can say that this is equal to the weight on MARS divided by the gravitational acceleration on MArs of this term is what we're looking for. So I'm gonna isolate that term and rearrange um these two equations here and we get that the gravitational acceleration of MArs equal to our ratio times the gravitational acceleration on Earth. So let's plug in our values. You know that the ratio is 0.8 that the gravitational acceleration on Earth is 9.8. When you plug this into your calculator, you get 3.7 m per second squared corresponding to our answer choice of D Thank you guys so much for watching this video helped. We will see you all in the next one