From the BBC website:
Super Bowl: Astronaut throws football '564,644
yards'
Nasa has released a video of the
International Space Station crew preparing to watch the Super Bowl from 250
miles above Earth.
Show the first 3 seconds (and then stop it!) of the
video. The BBC article is here:
The video is also available on YouTube:
So: how fast is the International Space Station moving?
Given that the circumference of the earth is about 25,000
miles, how long does it take the space station to orbit the earth?
Answers:
It travels 564,644 yards in about 64 seconds. (Use the fact that the ball is released about
5 seconds into the video and the video says it lasts 1 minute 9 seconds.
Divide the number of yards by 64 to get 8822.563 yards per
sec
There are 1760 yards in a mile. So this is 5.01282 miles per sec
Multiply by 3600 to get 18046.15 mph
Given the estimates involved, round this off to 18,000mph.
The circumference of the earth is 25,000 miles, which gives
a radius of 25,000 / (2*pi) = 3979
Add 250 (height of orbit of ISS) and then multiply by 2*pi()
to get the circumference of the orbit = 26600.
Divide this by the speed to get 1.5 hours for one orbit.
(According to Wikipedia, one orbit lasts 92 minutes.)
