METRE PER SECOND

(Redirected from Kilometres per second)

'Metre per second' (U.S. spelling: 'meter per second') is an SI derived unit of both speed (scalar) and velocity (vector quantity which specifies both magnitude and a specific direction), defined by distance in metres divided by time in seconds.
The proper official SI symbol and abbreviation is 'm·s⁻¹', or equivalently, 'm/s', but it is sometimes colloquially seen the quantity incorrectly abbreviated by the three character mnemonic ''mps'' in some U.S. coverage. Astronomical measurements sometimes list velocities in terms of kilometres per second, where a km/s is equivalent to 1 000 metres per second. This is sometimes incorrectly abbreviated as ''kps'' in popular literature.
One metre per second is roughly the speed of an average person walking.

Contents

Conversions

Remark

See also

Conversions

1 metre per second is equivalent to:
: ≈ 3.2808 feet per second (approximately)
: ≈ 2.2369 miles per hour (approximately)
: = 3.6 km·h⁻¹ (exactly)
1 foot per second = 0.3048 m·s⁻¹ (exactly)
1 mile per hour ≈ 0.4471 m·s⁻¹ (approximately)
1 km·h^-1 ≈ 0.2778 m·s⁻¹ (approximately)
1 kilometre per second is equivalent to:
: ≈ 0.6213 miles per second (approximately)
: ≈ 2,237 miles per hour (approximate)

Remark

Although m·s⁻¹ is considered as a derived unit, it could be viewed as more fundamental than the metre, since the latter is defined through the speed of light in the vacuum, taken to be exactly 299 792 458 m·s⁻¹ ''by definition'', which then gives the metre using the definition of one second.

See also

★ kilometre per hour

★ Orders of magnitude (speed)