Projectile motion describes the path taken by an object that is launched into the air and subject to gravity. When we talk about a projectile, like a baseball, it follows a curved path known as a parabola. This trajectory is determined by its initial speed and the angle at which it is thrown.
In this exercise, the baseball is thrown from a rooftop at a specified angle either above or below the horizontal. The initial velocity has to be broken down into two components:
- Horizontal component (): This doesn't change because gravity only affects the vertical component.
- Vertical component (): This is affected by gravity, causing the projectile to slow down as it rises and speed up as it falls towards the ground.
Understanding these components is key to analyzing how the projectile moves over time. Using trigonometry, the initial velocity can be split into these two components, and thus we can fully describe the projectile's motion.