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Small spiders are known to fly from place to place by letting out a length of silk, which then carries them around. Recently it was

Small spiders are known to fly from place to place by letting out a length of silk, which then carries them around. Recently it was discovered that they're actually using the electric field of the Earth to do this. Let us explore what a spider experiences.
Let us first model the flying spider as a charged object with charge Q, mass M(ignore the silk for now). It experiences gravity from the Earth as well as a downward pointing electric field. The spider is hovering motionless above the ground.
a. Do you expect the sign of the charge to be positive or negative?
b. Draw the free body diagram of the charged spider
c. If the mass and electric field are known, what is the charge that is needed to float the spider motionless?
d. If instead of motionless, the spider is accelerating upwards with an acceleration a, compute the charge.
2.
The spider from the last problem is now in the electric field of the wall from the example problem. It now experiences an electric field from the Earth in the -y direction with a value of Ey and one in the -x direction with a value of Ex.
a. Draw the free body diagram of the spider
b. Find an expression for the magnitude and direction of the resultant electric field.
c. Find an expression for the magnitude and direction of the total force on the spider.
Small spiders are known to fly from place to place by letting out a length of silk, which then carries them around. Recently it was discovered that they're actually using the electric field of the Earth to do this. Let us explore what a spider experiences.
Let us first model the flying spider as a charged object with charge Q, mass M(ignore the silk for now). It experiences gravity from the Earth as well as a downward pointing electric field. The spider is hovering motionless above the ground.
a. Do you expect the sign of the charge to be positive or negative?
b. Draw the free body diagram of the charged spider
c. If the mass and electric field are known, what is the charge that is needed to float the spider motionless?
d. If instead of motionless, the spider is accelerating upwards with an acceleration a, compute the charge.

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