How to find horizontal distance in projectile motion?
a spring board diver leaves the board 3 m above the water with a velocity of 2.3 ms-1 at an angle of 110 degrees to the board. at what horizontal distance from the end of the board will the diver enter the water?
a spring board diver leaves the board 3 m above the water with a velocity of 2.3 ms-1 at an angle of 110 degrees to the board. at what horizontal distance from the end of the board will the diver enter the water?
1 Answer
Like this:
Explanation:
The key is to separate the motion into its horizontal and vertical components and use the idea that they share the same time of flight.
I assume the angle to the horizontal is the complementary to
I will set the launch point as the origin and use the convention that "up is +ve".
I will use:
This becomes:
Using the quadratic formula we get:
The horizontal component of velocity is constant so we get: