Answer Happy

Problem 5: On its mission, our rover has collected several soil samples and found various concen- trations of the radioactive isotope nickel-59. The samples are from different eras in the Martian past. The file hw6_p5.mat contains the measurements made by the rover (time in years, where 0 denotes the present; and percent concentration of nickel-59). Write a MATLAB script called hw6_p5.m to use linear least squares to find the line of best fit, parabola of best fit, and exponential function of best fit for the data. Plot the data points and each of your best-fit curves in the same plot. Discuss your results: What are the arguments for or against each model? Caveat: Make sure you do an "apples-to-apples" comparison between the results 10 bonus points: Use MATLAB's fminsearch function to find the exponential func- tion of best fit using nonlinear least squares (5 points), and explain why the answer is different (5 points)