Orbital Timing for a Mission to Mars

There is currently both interest and excitement in a future manned mission to Mars. To help students better understand the logistics of a manned mission, freshman-level physics can be used to explore the timing involved in traveling between the Earth and Mars. This problem requires students to utilize a number of basic principles, including Kepler's third law, rotational dynamics, vectors, conservation of energy, and conservation of angular momentum. Applying multiple principles to a single problem is often a formidable task for students. However, practice in this endeavor better prepares students for “real world” phenomena in which physics principles rarely occur in isolation.