Cover letterThe goal of this project was to help us understand the world around us and how objects interact with each other. We did this by building rockets and calculating their trajectories. Our rocket design took refinement. We had to test our rockets and then research how to make them better, and we repeated this over and over again until we had a refined rocket for our exhibition.
Any object that is thrown will follow a parabola shape. The quadratic formula is used to find where this object started and how long of a flight it was. When applying this to our rockets, we had to consider that its starting height was not perfectly at zero and how the parachute would affect how long it was in the air. To be able to solve how high our rocket went, we needed to calculate the velocity. We did this by counting how many frames it took for the rocket to travel up a reference post beside our launch. Acceleration is how we calculate Gs on the rocket, and we calculate acceleration by finding the change in velocity. We can draw the forces acting on our rocket using a free-body diagram. According to Newton’s first law of motion, an object will stay in motion until acted on by a non-zero net force. This is Newton’s law of inertia. It is used to help us know how far our rocket will go and how fast it will accelerate. When building our rocket, we needed it not to be too light or else it would accelerate and decelerate too quickly. It also could not be too heavy because it would cause the rocket to not go as high in both cases. So, we found a balance of about 300 grams for our rocket, which helped it go pretty high. Newton’s second law of motion explains that the force acting on an object is directly proportional to the mass and acceleration of the object. This was useful because we could calculate how fast our rocket accelerated at the start of a flight. Newton’s third law is every action will have an equal and opposite reaction. This helps us explain why having the water shoot out of the bottom of our rocket moves it toward the sky. This is because the water is pushing on the bottle and moving it upwards. |