Question

An Unidentified Flying Object. You and your team spot a strange object hovering over the open ocean in broad daylight. You have nothing to reference in order to estimate its distance, height, or size, but you get the idea to use a concave mirror from a signal light. You disassemble the light, extract the mirror, and point it at the sun. You measure the distance to the sun’s image from the center of the mirror to be 3.409 m. You then point the mirror at the object and find that its image forms 3.445 m from the center of the mirror. The angle between the line of sight to the object and the horizontal is 32.0°.

(a) What is the distance between you and the object?
(b) What is the height of the object above the ground?
(c) If the width of the object’s image is 13.0 cm, what is the width of the object?

Answer 1