Horizontal Projectiles

Say you are taking a trip to South East Asia to some of the tallest buildings in the world for an introduction to horizontal motion.  This will be your first opportunity to apply some mathematical skills to two-dimensional motion, and you’ll get to see how horizontal and vertical motion combine to create projectile motion.

The Petronas Towers are the 4^th (and 5^th) tallest buildings in the world.  They reach into the sky over Kuala Lumpur, rising to a height of nearly 452 meters (1,483 ft). The sky bridge connecting the towers stands almost 180 meters above the ground and is nearly 60 meters in length.

One day, a curious physics student and two of her friends stood at one end of the sky bridge with three steel spheres.  Sphere 1 was dropped.  Sphere 2 was rolled horizontally along the sky bridge at 10 m/s, and sphere 3 was projected horizontally towards the other tower from the height of the sky bridge at an initial horizontal speed of 10 m/s.

Think about the horizontal and vertical positions of each of the three spheres. How does the horizontal velocity affect the rate at which the object falls?

Ramil Sagum