Thread: Mass or weight?

1kg=9.8N


So say you were converting newtons to kg is your answer going to be in mass or weight? It seems like to me that it would be weight because Newtons are used for force and so is weight but IDK.

Kilograms measure mass and newtons measure force.

On earth 9.8 N is the force of gravity on a 1 kg object. F=ma and "a" on earth is 9.8 m/s/s.

Thanks that helped a lot, I don't even know how I didn't make that connection.

In the equality you wrote both sides must be dimensionally consistent, so the kg there is in units of force, not mass. In terrestrial engineering kg is often an understood shorthand for kg-f.

Recall that weight = mass x gravity.

Therefore an object's weight (in newtons) is equal to its mass (in kg) times the gravitational constant at Earth's surface, which is 9.8.

We'd use a different factor on Mars.