WElcome
In this site with the compound use of what we learned in our Physics and Logical Thinking courses we will present our interstellar project. Below you will find the information from our research and the calculations made to create our very own spaceship with the objective of getting to another planet similar to the Earth as well as some links that will open in another tab a graphic representation made by us with the use of programming and coding in the "Scratch" app. Scroll down to the various subtitles to learn more about it.
Introduction
During this project, we evaluated the habitable conditions of a certain planet, the time it would take for us to reach it with an interstellar starship, the number of human generations it would take, as well as the dimensions, capacity, and volume of the starship.
The purpose of the project is to design a vehicle-ecosystem that is intended to transport people to a planet outside the solar system.
Today it is known that interstellar traveling is impossible for our civilization, since the energy required to make a trip of that magnitude is much greater than mankind can produce in one year; another problem to face is that a trip like this one will require thousands of years and it would take many generations of human beings to get to the destination. Difficulties of the environment of outer space include but are not limited to radiation, dust and fragments of matter that is not known for sure what size and amount of them are there, and that can potentially damage the ship and life inside.
But, in this project, with help of science we are going to make it happen.
The Planet
The planet we chose for our project is called Trappist 1-d. It is located 40 light years away from Earth. Its mass is 170% that of Earth´s, while its average temperature is -73º Celsius. It can be found within the "Goldilocks (habitable)" zone of its star. Its orbit around it lasts from 4.5-73 terrestrial days.
Time
In order to find the time it would take for us to reach the planet, we divided the distance (3.8e+14 km) over our speed (60 km/s), then changed the answer to years, to obtain a result of 200,000 years. Fun fact: that´s the same number of years humankind has been living on Earth.
Number of generations
If we take into account the fact that an average generation equals 35 years, then we divide the number of years it would take for us to reach the planet (200,000) by 35 to obtain the result of 5,700 generations.
Volume of the starship
Since our starship is in a spherical shape, we use the formula 4/3(3.1416)(radius)^3 to obtain its volume. We established that the diameter of the starship would be that of 600 m, hence its radius of 300 m. By substituting that value into the equation, we obtain a volume of 1,130,0000 cubic meters.
NUMBER OF PEOPLE TRAVELLING
We determined that 1,000 Earth citizens would be the appropriate number of travellers in order to maintain the ship´s ecosystem thriving. They wouldn´t be the ones to reach the planet, but their descendants will.
conclusion
To make this project we made use of the knowledge acquired during this semester in Logical Thinking as well as in Physics. By using what we learned in Physics we managed to create a "real" spaceship capable to travel and transport generations in space with a fully measured plan, by this we mean we got its mass, volume how long would the travel be and how much generations would pass, all of this stated clearly in our data. We made use of Scratch a tool we learned in Logical Thinking by programming sprites to represent graphically a brief explanation and some calculations of the math made in the project. We can conclude that the classes lead us to the realization of a very complete project learned a lot in the physics matter and C++ coding to program in Logical Thinking. This can be useful and we will keep it in case its needed.
SCRATCHES
Speed Of Light Animation
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/131295903/#player
Spaceship Arriving to the Planet Animation
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/131387437/#player
Spaceship Mass Calculation
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/131557178/#player
Travel Time Calculation
Sofía Garza A01570112
Andrés Piñones A01570150
Alan Garza A01570179
Jose Luis Obregón A01570315
REFERENCES
Solar sail. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail
By Bruce McClure in Space | January 22, 2014. (n.d.). What is an astronomical unit? | EarthSky.org. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from http://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-astronomical-unit
Kinematic Equations. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2016, from http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/1DKin/Lesson-6/Kinematic-Equations
W. (2016). TRAPPIST-1 - The new home for humanity? Space Engine. Retrieved November 28, 2016, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UaJwgX_rgg
Credits:
Created with images by fleskw - "space" • fleskw - "space" • skeeze - "international space station view space" • Unsplash - "stars nightsky milky way" • fleskw - "space"