Playing CatchMihir SharmaAward: Top 100
School: glenbard west high school This photo represents projectile motion. An object that is launched into the air, with gravity acting as its only acceleration, is called a projectile. To capture the path of this glow-in-the-dark football, I asked two of my friends to play catch as they normally would. As shown through the light trail, captured by adjusting the shutter speed of my camera, the football practices a parabolic pattern. This is because of the lack of any acceleration on the projectile aside from gravity. Once the ball left my friend's hand, it had practically no horizontal acceleration, aside from a negligible amount caused by air resistance. This meant the horizontal component of the velocity was even throughout the ball's flight, resulting in the same horizontal distance traveled from the ball's initial height to the peak of its trajectory and then back down to the same height. However, this does not mean the ball's total velocity was always constant. When looking closely at the ball's path, it's evident that its light trail becomes much denser at the top of the peak. This is because as the force of gravity acts on the ball, its vertical velocity decreases until it reaches 0 m/s. The light trail becomes less dense on the way down as the gravitational force is continuously exerted, causing the ball to experience an increasingly negative vertical velocity. The constant horizontal speed plus this changing vertical velocity results in the parabola. The camera captures this motion, displaying the almost snake-scale-like pattern. 
|
|