Examination questions are often set in a ‘context’. This means that you are presented with some standard physics in a specific situation, often a novel one. When dealing with the topic of gravitational fields the examiner does not have many contexts to choose from — once you have calculated the field around one spherical object you have calculated them all! This means that he or she has to use a bit of imagination, in this case a spacecraft landing on a very small asteroid in search of minerals. This might happen in the future but it hasn’t yet.
The question is taken from OCR Physics B 2863/01, June 2005, and is reproduced by kind permission of OCR. The answers that follow are the responsibility of PHYSICS REVIEW and have been neither provided nor approved by OCR.
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