Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2013/paper-1/section-b/b8/solution

Take inertial axes parallel, with frame moving at relative to and origins coincident at zero time. The Lorentz factor is ; are separations of the same pair of events in , and primed quantities are their separations in . The transverse coordinates are unchanged. For two events on an inertial clock's worldline,
The proper time is that clock's elapsed time; uniform speed gives . Coordinate intervals between spatially separated events must instead be Lorentz-transformed with their spatial separation included.
For the round trip in the station frame, the rendezvous distance is , and the return has the same speed and distance. Thus . Its departure and arrival both occur at the station, so for these endpoints:
This uses the return speed as measured by the station. The elapsed time aboard A, apart from an ideal instantaneous turn, would be .
For the crash, A's station-frame velocity components are , while B's are . Here and . Four-momentum conservation, with no separately escaping radiation, gives the wreckage totals in the station frame:
In B's original inertial frame the same totals are
The invariant wreckage mass is , exceeding because internal energy remains in the wreckage. Its momentum cannot be specified without naming a frame; both natural frames have been given.

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