Question

A small hole in the wing of a space shuttle requires a 15.9 cm2 patch.

Answer 1

The patch area in square kilometers is 1.59*10⁻⁹ km₂

Why?

This is an unit conversion problem. We have to convert from cm² to km². We can do that by knowing that there are 100 cm in 1 m, and 1000 m in 1 km, so 100000 cm=1km. Knowing that we can apply the following conversion factor:

$15.9 cm^{2} * (\frac{1 km}{100000 cm} )^{2}=0.00000000159 km^{2}$

Now to convert this value to scientific notation, we have to move the decimal point to the right until we get a whole number, and the exponent of the number 10 is going to be the number of spaces we moved to the right (negative), so the final answer is:

$0.00000000159 km^{2}=1.59*10^{-9} km^{2}$

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