Introduction At this point you should have familiarized yourself with the experiment's scenario. A ball was released from a window of a car moving at a constant velocity of 10 miles/hour across a parking lot. Two cameras recorded the ball's behavior: one was attached to the car's window observing the ball's trajectory relative to the car, and a second camera was stationary recording the ball's trajectory relative to the parking lot. The goal is for the passenger to release the ball at the appropriate moment for the ball to land in a stationary bucket. Our goal during this lab is to understand how the horizontal and vertical motion of a projectile have different properties while occuring simultaneously and independently. |
Refer to the following information for the next three questions.
Shown below is a screen capture from the video (taken at 8:09) that has been marked up by the film maker with the actual measurements for the ball's vertical drop and its range. In this section you will determine the time the ball spent in the air and a scaling factor to convert measurements made in centimeters on the screen capture to the actual distances in meters that were occuring in the actual physical experiment.
Refer to the following information for the next seven questions.
You are now going to create a grid locating the horizontal and vertical positions of the ball's center of mass as it moves into the bucket. Your final picture will look similar to the diagram shown below.
Note that the first "ball" has a vertical and a horizontal position of (0,0).
Using the "0" positions shown on the gridded diagram, measure the ball's cumulative horizontal displacement across the page. Record your results in the data table provided below first in centimeters and then converted into meters.
ball |
cm measure |
meter conversion |
1 |
0 |
0 |
Refer to the following information for the next seven questions.
Repeat this process for the vertical measurements of the ball's center of mass. Note that all of your measurements in this section should be negative since the video does all of its analysis with "down" representing a negative direction.
ball |
cm measure |
meter conversion |
1 |
0 |
0 |
Refer to the following information for the next five questions.
EXTENSION. Using energy methods determine the ball's final resultant velocity as it entered the bucket. Take the zero level for potential energy to be the top of the bucket. Let the mass of the ball be 14.53 grams. In this section, give all of your energy answers in joules (J).
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According to a
later video, the success occured on the 18th attempt. The crew filmed for roughly 1.5 hours. Now we know why the young boy was SO excited in the video!