Statement of Purpose for Cornell's Engineering Program

592 Words2 Pages

1970 was the year of NASA’s most successful failure. Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon However, even the best of plans can go awry. Apollo 13’s oxygen tank exploded significantly past its mid-correction course – the last point at which the aircraft could return back to Earth in case of an accident. It was overpowered by the moon’s gravitation and a crash seemed imminent. With oxygen and water running out on the ship it was up to NASA’s engineers to bring the astronauts back home. During my school’s science fair I worked in collaboration with a classmate for a project on differential equations and their applications to real-world situations. We chose to apply differential equations to the Apollo 13 situation. We developed a program in C++ to give us data points for the value of the burn that Apollo 13 needed in order to go around the moon and safely back to Earth. Using a mix of computer programming and graphing software we developed a module that gave us data points of the value of the thrust requi...

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