Determine the gravitational field 300km above the surface of the earth. how does this compare to the field on the earth's surface?

The strength of the gravitational field is given by:

where
G is the gravitational constant
M is the Earth's mass
r is the distance measured from the centre of the planet.

In our problem, we are located at 300 km above the surface. Since the Earth radius is R=6370 km, the distance from the Earth's center is:


And now we can use the previous equation to calculate the field strength at that altitude:


And we can see this value is a bit less than the gravitational strength at the surface, which is .

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