Trouble with conversion

[GalaxiesFinestToday]

Im trying to learn how to convert m/s to mph. Heres what i got so far.

1 m/s=2.23 mph

So say a NASA lander was landing on Mars. The lander was going 6 m/s. If my calculations are correct, the lander is going 13.38 mph? Sorry if i got this wrong, im only in 7th grade

[andrewas]

You have it right. Convert meters/second to meters/hour by multiplying by 3600, then convert to mph by multiplying by 1/1609 , giving you a conversion factor of 2.23.

As a check you can ask google for most simple cases and wolfram alpha for more complex stuff.

[How2FoldSoup]

Yes that is correct.

Welcome to unit analysis...If for whatever reason you felt like converting those units to anything else here is how you would do it with only googling the meter-foot conversion.

1m is 3.2 feet so we can say we move 1 meter per 3.2 feet in 1 second so (1m/s)*((3.2ft/s)/(1m/s))) which just is 3.2ft/s since it's being divided by 1.

Then we can change that to hours by asking how many seconds in a minute and minutes in an hour. So there are 60seconds/minute and 60 minutes/hour or 3600 seconds/hour(60*60)

So you'd get (1m/s)*(3.2ft/s)*(3600 seconds/hour)

Finally we have to find how many feet are in a mile which is 1mile/5280 feet.

so you would have (1m/s)*(3.2ft/s)*(3600s/h)*(1mile/5280ft) which gives you 2.18miles/h.

You can see how all the units cancel from left to right and you are left with miles/hour. Also it looks like google's conversion is a little off

Hope this makes sense!

edit:Clarity for miles

[GalaxiesFinestToday]

Wow. You just explained it all in a simple sentence. I was looking at conversion videos but they were confusing. I'll have to practice this some more but thank you.

[Seret]

A general tip: always do all the actual data crunching in nice metric units, then convert to imperial at the end if you have to.

(Assuming your original data is metric, of course...)

[andrewas]

1m is 3.2 feet

You might want to use a few more significant figures. Also, that's rounded incorrectly.