Honestly, I was going to add this to my previous post about the jumping car but I didn't because I wanted to finish. So, here it is and more. Actually, I will just make a projectile motion spreadsheet. That way, anytime you want to do a projectile motion problem, you can come here. Maybe this is a bad idea, but I am going to do it anyway.
To start with, I will just say that for projectile motion the horizontal and vertical motions are independent (except for the time it takes). If you want a refresher on projectile motion, here you go. Oh, a couple of assumptions:
- Object starts at x = 0 m and y = h m.
- The object is shot at an angle theta above the horizontal with an initial velocity v0
- There is a constant vertical acceleration g
- The object leaves the starting point at time t
- The final vertical position will be on the ground (at y= 0 m)
The x-motion will then be:
The y-motion will be:
If I want to find out how far this thing will go, I can use the y-motion to solve for the time (I will need the quadratic equation). Then I can take this time and plug it into the x-motion equation to find out how far it goes. Here are the calculations in a spreadsheet.
If I put in an initial velocity of 15 m/s at an angle of 24 degrees with an initial height of 1.5 meters, the car would go about 20 meters (65 feet).
Yeeeee HAWWWWWW. Next, on The Dukes!
