Chapter 10, Problem 14RQ

One of the NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering is Engineering the Tools of Scientific Discovery.

According to the NAE website: “Grand experiments and missions of exploration always need engineering expertise to design the tools, instruments, and systems that make it possible to acquire new knowledge about the physical and biological worlds.”

Solar sails are a means of interplanetary propulsion using the radiation pressure of the sun to accelerate a spacecraft. The table contained in the starting Excel file shows the radiation pressure at the orbits of the eight planets.

Create a table showing the area in units of square meters of a solar sail needed to achieve various accelerations for various spacecraft masses at the distances from the sun of the various planets. Your solution should use data validation and VLOOKUP to select a planet and the corresponding radiation pressure. The columns of your table should list masses of the spacecraft (including the mass of the sail) ranging from 100 to 1000 kilograms in increments of 100 kilograms. The rows should list accelerations from 0.0001 to 0.001 g in increments of 0.001 g, where g is the acceleration of Earth’s gravity, 9.8 meters per second squared. All constants and conversion factors should be placed in individual cells using appropriate labels, and all formulae should reference these cells and should NOT be directly coded into the formulae. You should use absolute, relative, and mixed addressing as appropriate.

Note

The astronomical unit (AU) is the average distance from Earth to the sun.