Our flight planning continues...
We were planning a mission to go from Wallops Space Flight Center to Boston, to NYC, to Philadelphia, to Baltimore, to Washington, DC and back to Wallops.
We are testing air quality and circling each of these cities once.
We will be flying NASA's P-3B Orion.
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| NASA P-3B Orion in flight Discover-AQ |
To find out if our mission was possible we had to do some math. YAY!!! (standing O for math)
When flying between cities we are flying 450 mph. When circling to collect data we are flying 250 mph. Each circle for collecting data is 125 miles. There are five circles.
First we added up all the spaces between each city.
417 mi + 191 mi + 81 mi + 89 mi + 36 mi + 121 mi = 935 miles
We need to figure out how much fuel this will take.
To do this, we need to know how much time it will take to fly 935 miles. We need to divide 935 by 450. That equals 2 hrs with a remainder of 35 miles. We then had to figure out how long it will take to fly 35 miles. It will take an extra 5 minutes to fly the remaining 35 miles. Total cruise time is 2 hrs 5 min.
Now we need to know how much fuel for data collection. Each circle is 125 miles and there are five of them. 125 x 5 = 625 miles. It will take 2 hrs 30 minutes. (625 / 250 = 2 and 1/2)
[insert work here]
Total mission time:
2 hr 5 min (cruise) + 2 hr 30 min (data) + 3 hrs (safety margin) = 7 hrs 35 min
This would take 32,502 lbs of fuel.
YAY!!! We can fly the mission with almost 30,000 lbs of fuel to spare!
Emily and Sally asked us if we were going to do more than one spiral at each city. Now we need to see if we can do that.
