Acceleration due to gravity on Mars is about one—third that on Earth. Suppose you throw a ball upward with the same velocity on Mars as on Earth. How would the balls maximum height compare to that on Earth?
1 Answer
The ball would travel 3 times as high.
Explanation:
The equation for finding the displacement (vertical height in this case) of an object with a constant acceleration is:
where
and
For more information about the resoning behind this formula, look here.
We can rearrange this formula to give:
since we want to know about displacement (height).
When throwing a ball vertically, the velocity at the top of the throw (when the ball is highest) is 0 , so we can remove the
Now we can look at this equation in terms of Earth.
The initial velocity
This can be rearranged to produce:
From this we see that
Therefore the displacement or height (