Landing a rocket

Worksheet for this simulation by Heidi Smith of The Angeline Academy of Innovation (July 7, 2024)

Before running the simulation, read the description of the motion below and see if you can predict what the different graphs will look like. Up is positive, and the origin is ground level.

This is a simulation of the motion of a ball that has a rocket engine mounted underneath it. The ball is released from rest from a height of 40 meters above the ground, and it falls 20 meters under the influence of gravity alone. At that point, the rocket engine kicks in, giving the ball an upward acceleration of 10 m/s/s (as opposed to the acceleration downward of 10 m/s/s that it just had).

You can see the ball's motion diagram, with the position marked at 0.5 s intervals, as well as graphs of the ball's position, velocity, and acceleration, all as a function of time.

Simulation written by Andrew Duffy, and first posted on 8-17-2018.

This work by Andrew Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This simulation can be found in the collection at http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/classroom.html.

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