On your first trip to Planet X you happen to take along a 175 mass, a 40-cm-long spring, a meter stick, and a stopwatch. You're curious about the acceleration due to gravity on Planet X, where ordinary tasks seem easier than on earth, but you can't find this information in your Visitor's Guide. One night you suspend the spring from the ceiling in your room and hang the mass from it. You find that the mass stretches the spring by 26.7 . You then pull the mass down 11.3 and release it. With the stopwatch you find that 11.0 oscillations take 16.0 .

We're not going to do your homework for you, sorry! But what we can do is help guide you a bit. Assuming the question is to determine the local gravitational constant on this planet, you have been given two pieces of information that you can use to work this out.

From the spring's oscillation with a 40 Kg mass you can work out the value of the spring constant k, from:

freq = sqrt(k/m)

You know the value of the frequency from the fact that you had 16 oscillations in 11 seconds.

Next, the spring stretches 26.7 cm when the mass is hung from it, so you have your next equation:

mg = kx
175 Kg *g = k*26.7 cm

So now you can determine the value of g on this planet. Post back and let us know what you get for an answer.