Thursday, May 19, 2011

Mini Unit Study: Space Shuttle Endeavour Math Day2

How fast is the space shuttle Endeavour traveling around the earth?

So we go to Real Time Satellite Tracking at N2YO.com which gives the location of Endeavour in latitude and longitude as well as ~ travel speed. According to this site Endeavour was traveling at 4.62 m/s during Day 2 of it's mission. That means it travels 5 miles in about a second. WOW!

So we have to do a little math to get miles per hour.

Let's start with basics:

60 seconds = 1 minute
60 minute = 1 hour


16 272 m/h


This means that the Endeavour orbits Earth (and sees a sunrise) once every 92 minutes!

We finished the day with a writing prompt titled "What would you bring on the shuttle?"

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