One way to provide artificial gravity (i. e., a feeling of weight) on long space voyages is to separate a spacecraft into two parts at the ends of a long cable, and set them rotating around each other. A craft has been separated into two parts with a mass of 70600 kg each, at the ends of a cable with their centers of mass 155 m apart, rotating around the center point of the cable with a period of 385.3 seconds. 1) If the cable is reeled in so that the the centers of the two pieces are now only 119.35 m apart, what will the new period be?
2) What happens to the angular momentum L and kinetic energy K of the system consisting of both pieces of the space ship when the two pieces are pulled closer to the center?