# Nautical Miles

• Aug 18th 2008, 02:46 AM
magentarita
Nautical Miles
A nautical mile equals the length of arc subtended by a central angle of 1 minute on a "great circle" on the surface of the Earth. If the radius of the Earth is taken as 3960 miles, express 1 nautical mile in terms of ordinary, or statute, miles.

A great circle, according to the book, is "any circle drawn on the surface of Earth that divides Earth into two equal hemispheres."
• Aug 18th 2008, 06:04 AM
ticbol
Quote:

Originally Posted by magentarita
A nautical mile equals the length of arc subtended by a central angle of 1 minute on a "great circle" on the surface of the Earth. If the radius of the Earth is taken as 3960 miles, express 1 nautical mile in terms of ordinary, or statute, miles.

A great circle, according to the book, is "any circle drawn on the surface of Earth that divides Earth into two equal hemispheres."

If R = 3960 statute miles. then one great circle is 2pi(3960) statute miles.
That is for 360 degrees.
In minutes, that is 360*60 minutes
So, 1-minute central angle will subtend
(2pi*3960 statute miles) / (360*60 min)
= 1.15192 statute miles per min.

Therefore, 1 nautical mile = 1.15192 statute miles -------answer.
• Aug 18th 2008, 08:54 PM
magentarita
wow...
I could have never worked that question out myself.

Can you help me with the other question about sunrise?
{"found_math": false, "script_math_tex": 0, "script_math_asciimath": 0, "math_annotations": 0, "math_alttext": 0, "mathml": 0, "mathjax_tag": 0, "mathjax_inline_tex": 0, "mathjax_display_tex": 0, "mathjax_asciimath": 0, "img_math": 0, "codecogs_latex": 0, "wp_latex": 0, "mimetex.cgi": 0, "/images/math/codecogs": 0, "mathtex.cgi": 0, "katex": 0, "math-container": 0, "wp-katex-eq": 0, "align": 0, "equation": 0, "x-ck12": 0, "texerror": 0, "url": "http://mathhelpforum.com/pre-calculus/46169-nautical-miles-print.html", "fetch_time": 1527123334000000000, "content_mime_type": "text/html", "warc_filename": "crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-22/segments/1526794865863.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20180523235059-20180524015059-00240.warc.gz", "warc_record_offset": 175615134, "warc_record_length": 2888, "token_count": 380, "char_count": 1375, "score": 3.5, "int_score": 4, "crawl": "CC-MAIN-2018-22", "snapshot_type": "latest", "language": "en", "language_score": 0.8765830993652344, "file_path": "/sailhome/yjruan/project/latent-lm/data/processed/finemath-4plus/finemath-4plus/train-00052-of-00064.parquet"}