The patch area in square kilometers is 1.59*10⁻⁹ km₂
Why?
This is an unit conversion problem. We have to convert from cm² to km². We can do that by knowing that there are 100 cm in 1 m, and 1000 m in 1 km, so 100000 cm=1km. Knowing that we can apply the following conversion factor:
[tex]15.9 cm^{2} * (\frac{1 km}{100000 cm} )^{2}=0.00000000159 km^{2}[/tex]
Now to convert this value to scientific notation, we have to move the decimal point to the right until we get a whole number, and the exponent of the number 10 is going to be the number of spaces we moved to the right (negative), so the final answer is:
[tex]0.00000000159 km^{2}=1.59*10^{-9} km^{2}[/tex]
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