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  1. Launch Time: 10:37 am

    Team Members Present: Jason Stack, Marcus Nicholas and Michael Kennedy were all present for this launch.

    Play-by-Play: Initially the rocket was created using the parts listed in the pre-flight briefing. The rocket was launched from Kerbin and angled in order to successfully travel outside of Kerbin's atmosphere. The rocket was then directed into orbit around Kerbin. Kerbin was orbited a few times. The rocket was then returned back to Kerbin by using a maneuver that brought the rocket back into Kerbin's atmosphere. The bottom engines were released, then the second engines, leaving only the pod left. The pod descended to 1,000 meters above Kerbin and then the parachute was deployed. The pod landed safely on Kerbin. 
     

    Photographs: dsd.pngdsds.pngscreenshot0.pngscreenshot11.pngscreenshot12.pngscreenshot2.pngscreenshot3.pngscreenshot4.pngscreenshot5.pngscreenshot6.pngscreenshot8.pngscreenshot9.png

    Time-of-Flight: 4 hours and 5 minutes

    Summary: Our flight was a great success. We planned to accomplish all initial milestones, including a successful manned orbit and a successful Kerbal EVA. All of these desired milestones were accomplished. Our spaceship and Kerbal manning the ship returned safely to Kerbin after successfully reaching orbit around Kerbin. By reaching a manned orbit around Kerbin, all the initial milestones were accomplished by this launch. 

    Opportunities / Learnings: Establishing what the launch goals are and designing the rocket accordingly is very important. Failure to do so will result in an inability to accomplish any milestones.

    Strategies / Project Timeline: After this accomplishment, our next goal is to reach orbit around the moon and land on the moon. 

    Milestone Awards Presented: 

    • Launch to 10 km - $10,000
    • Manned launch to 10 km - $20,000
    • Manned launch to 50 km - $30,000
    • Achieving stable orbit - $40,000
    • Achieving stable manned orbit - $50,000
    • First Kerbal EVA - $60,000

    Available Funds: $257,818

  2. On March 16, 2014, fezziksphysics referenced my post, and I was interested to know someone else's perspective on their learning style and how they understand material. I definitely agree that the VIP charts became much easier once I understood and applied what I had learned. This part of physics reminded me of math, I just needed to do the problems a couple of times to truly understand them. I also really liked how she wrote down all the formulas, also!

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    aj31597
    Latest Entry

    In the movie Furious 7 there was a really cool scene where they dropped their high end cars out of a military plane with parachutes with the drivers in them in hopes to land on a road and continue driving. To shoot the scene they actually did it dropping two cars out at a time with parachutists following on the way down with cameras. At 12,000 feet the skydivers had to follow the cars at the angles needed and dodged falling debris. The shooting for this movie not only took caution and creativity but a knowledge of physics as well.

  3. Monigle123
    Latest Entry

    While re-watching Breaking Bad, or as some call it the meth show, I noticed there was a lot of physics in it. One episode that relates to a new unit we just started was season 5, episode 1. This episode (warning spoilers) is the Giant magnet episode. A short summary of what happened: “That night, Mike hot-wires the gate into the APD parking lot. Walt and Jesse drive the magnet-equipped truck next to the building to the wall outside the evidence room. The magnet disables the guard's computer, alerting the police. In desperation, Walt cranks the magnet up to its maximum voltage, sending a force so strong it tips the truck over. The police security guard finds the evidence room destroyed by the magnet and sends officers outside to apprehend the crooks, but Walt and Jesse escape with Mike, leaving the truck behind.†(Breakingbad.wikia.com). This relates heavily on physics because they constructed a giant electromagnet to create electromagnetic waves. With this they are able to destroy electronics with magnetic fields.blogentry-3421-0-40493600-1429280386_thu

  4. I'm still struggling with the concept of voltage, but here'smy understanding so far:

    Electrostaticpotential is how much work it takes to move a test charge through a field. (W=Fdr) This requires areference point- I am moving the charge from a certain point to another point. These reference points become the limits of integration, and theequation with substitutions works out to be q1q2/(4πεor)when the charge is moved from zero potential (at infinity). However, to make this measure more helpful weeliminate the charge and make electrical potential (voltage/ potentialdifference) equal to work per unit charge to move any test charge in the givenfield. Therefore the equation forvoltage from a point charge is q/(4πεor). However, this is just a restatement of ournotes and what really gives me trouble is trying to conceptualize voltage. It seems that a common analogy to explainvoltage is a closed circuit of pipes with a pump. Apparently electrical potential can belikened to water pressure in that water (charges) will flow from areas of highpressure (aka potential) to low. In thisscenario potential difference would be the difference in water pressure. Apparently voltage actually used to be called"electrical pressure." Also,voltage can be thought of as the ability to do work. Although this statement requires looking atthings from another perspective- how much work is done when a charge goes fromhigh potential to low- it makes sense when you think about how batteries arerated by voltage. I guess what reallyconfuses me about voltage is that it is not a concrete event or force, but insteada measure of "potential" as in: if I had a hypothetical test chargewhat would be the work necessary to move it from here to there. It's almost as confusing as how fields are a"condition in space" which would cause a particle to move if aparticle was present!

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    dwarner
    Latest Entry

    blog-0828508001366815304.jpg

    FIFA is a videogame that is meant to be a simulation of a real game of soccer. At EA sports, there goal is to make the game as realistic as possible. They make a new game annualy and attempt to improve the game each year. This year, EA sports has made a new ball physics engine. Their goal is to use real physics to make shooting as realistic as possible. This allows the player to take different types of shots like a curling shot or dipping shot.

    This new physics engine uses the accelaration of gravity (9.81 m/s^2) to correctly make the ball drop when taking a shot. It also factors in weather conditions like rain and wind that can also effect the balls movement.

    magnus_effect.jpg

    These new ball physics will allow EA sports to create a more realistic soccer simulation.

  5. Driving involves a plethora of physics knowledge if you want to be not a good driver, but a great one. There are a lot of ways to be able to calculate the time it takes for a car going X miles per hour for X meters to stop. V=D/T is one equation that you could use to solve a problem like this, and knowing how to do this helps you know when to start to break or when to at least slow down. You'll never know how many meters your going but having knowledge like this always helps. This is all very important because being able to have knowledge of this is better than just guessing.

  6. there is all sorts of physics in sun light. for instance the sun light we see is actually delayed and comes in waves. what happens when a reflective surface meets sun light is that the light is refracted and shines on another surface. this actually occurs on several glass sky scrapers in cities and has been known to actually melt other objects such as parts of cars because the sun light is reflected back on an object.

  7. madyrice419
    Latest Entry

    I was scrolling through Instagram and found this hilarious meme of someone's Tinder profile. It reminded me of earlier this week when Mr. Fullerton said that if a girl had the quadratic formula tattooed on her forehead, she wouldn't get a date. I guess nerds don't need love. Anyways, I entitled this blog "Dying" because, first of all, that meme made me die of laughter and, second of all, the first AP Physics C test killed me. With reflection I realized that this year is going to be a lot harder than I even first anticipated. I am not the smartest student on Earth, but I have an ambition and unwavering optimism in everything I do. Seeing that I "failed" a test really killed my spirits, and I am hoping that this class will not be the death of me. But deep down I know I can do it. AND YOU CAN TOO. We've just got to keep up with the work and keep trying. I learned that if I get slapped in the face by physics problems, I need to slap them back twice as hard. 

    meme.png

  8. Moog is the leading producer of synthesizers in the world, I would guess. For every concert i have been too, the staple instruments for the piano player are a hammond B3 organ (with the leslie speaker ofcourse), and one or more Moog brand synthesizers.

    Well, we all love the theremin, and Moog just created the first polyphonic theremin. Many have tried, and all but Moog has failed. Apparently, when you put 2 theremins in the same room, they dont work, or you get alot of feedback with eacher, but Moog figured out how to make them work together. Check it out!!

  9. I was at the gym the other day watching one of my teammates do her uneven parallel bar routine, and I thought about something new: in her giant swings, her feet would have to be moving extremely fast in order for her body to make it around the bar. How fast do they travel?

    A giant is a skill on the uneven bars in which a gymnast swings all the way around the bar in a handstand, ex:

    Giant swings follow a pattern of uniform circular motion. I timed one of my teammates doing her giants, and one swing took approximately 1.35 seconds to complete. Because she is 5' tall (60 inches), the radius of her motion is 60". Using the equation vc=(2πr)/T, I subbed in the values: vc=(2π(60))/1.35 to find that her feet were traveling at 279.25 in/sec. This means

    that my teammate's feet travel at 190.4 mph in her giant swings, which actually sounds very wrong.... Ah well, I

    tried.

  10. March is here and along with it comes warm weather and basketball. I thought that a good way to celebrate it would be to put up my basketball hoop. I went to put it up in my lawn (i have it facing the street cause no one ever comes driving down my street) and left it balenced so i could get the sandbags toput on the base. However, the hoop wouldnt stay up. The center of mass isn't the center of the base because it isn't symetrical. So, i placed a shovel on the base to provide enough tourqe to oppose the motion so that it could throw the sandbag on to keep it in place. I took a task that shoulda been easy and made it hard because i forgot about basic physics. But i gotthe job done.

    Random Sports Fact: Harvard is in the tourney for the 1st time since the 1940's

  11. Today I rode about 3 billion elevators over the course of 8 hours. Acceleration plays an important role in elevators. When an elevator goes up a floor, acceleration is going down and when the elevator is going down a floor, acceleration goes up.

  12. aschu103
    Latest Entry

    The hardest thing we do every day - waking up and getting out of bed.

    Newton's first law states that things at rest are likely to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Whether that force is our alarm clock, angry parents, or the panic of sleeping in a few minutes too late, it can be hard to get moving. Most days it's better to just lay in bed and hope that your homework does itself.

    However, Newton's law doesn't apply in the first few minutes after getting up - once you're in motion, it's very easy to go back to sleep. This is because of a phenomenon known as the "Sleepy Teenager Complex," caused by too much homework and not enough time to do all of it while still completing necessary functions.

    To this day, a cure for Sleepy Teenager Complex continues to allude us.

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    Shooting the ball in lacrosse requires physics. When the ball is shot, it initially starts at rest and increases in velocity very quickly. When i shoot the ball it goes so fast that no one can see it and i always score. Because of the force behind the ball, it breaks the lacrosse net usually. sometimes after going through the net it hits a person. The speed of the ball is so high that it knocks most people over. The net does create some resitance along with the air so no one usually dies. They only break a bone or two.

  13. Don't spend your life trying to find a place where fisics doesn’t apply because it doesn't exist. Not even when you are blogging. When blogging you are most likely sitting at a chair and typing on a keyboard. This applies to Newton’s third law that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. As you sit in the chair to blog you apply a force, your weight, to the chair and the chair pushes back up at you with an equal force. This also happens when you press on the keys to type. As you push on the keys they push back with an equal force. If this law wasn’t true blogging would be fairly difficult considering you would fall through chairs and break keys on the key board. Existence in general would be hard without this law. This isn’t however the only fisics to blogging because inside a computer is almost every subject to fisics ranging from thermodynamics and fluids in the cooling system, magnetism and energy in the wiring of it, waves because there is light and sound waves emitted, circular motion in the fan and modern fisics due to the atoms that build and keep the computer together.

  14. Basically when doing anything in life physics is involved. When driving physics is involved. Driving is all about getting from one place to another in the quickest amount of time because time is a precious thing and noone wants to waste it. When going from one place to another and then back to the same place from where you started is called displacement. When driving there is a certain speed that you are allowed to go. To get up to the speed that you want you must make you vehicle accelerate to the speed that you want. The velocity is how fast that your car is going. If you are stopped at a red light or a stop light your car won't go anywhere because according to Newtons first law an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon another force which could be you moving your foot from the break pedal to the gas pedal.

  15. As a little programming project, I am working on a basic physics engine that is intended to eventually handle spherical particles, walls, and springs. Currently, I only have particles that are fully functional. This is an open-source project and it is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/simple-swing-physics-sim/.

  16. ericaplukas
    Latest Entry

    As summer is so close to us, many of us go to amusement parks. Seabreeze is right around the corner from us and as you know, the Jack Rabbit is one of the oldest roller coasters! As i day dream about being on the coaster instead of studying for physics, i cant help but think of the physics that have to do with a roller coaster.

    There is much to think about when one thinks of a roller coaster! The mass of the cart and the people inside of it play a major role in understanding the concept of force. Force= mass X acceleration and the mass a person usually tries to find consists of the people as well as the cart.

    Another factor in thinking about a roller coaster and physics is the energy that the cart uses when traveling up and down the hills in the track. Two type of energy are used, potential energy and kinetic energy. As the coaster gets higher in the air, gravity can pull it down a greater distance, this is the potential energy increasing.he potential energy you build going up the hill can be released as kinetic energy..the energy of motion that takes you down the hill. Once you start cruising down that first hill, gravity takes over and all the built up potential e­nergy converts to kinetic energy. Gravity applies a constant downward force on the carts causing the switch in energies.

    Physics can also be fun!! Enjoy summer and think about the physics in everything you're doing!! =]

  17. Trying to think of a new topic about which to blog I somehow remembered seeing this video and thought it only appropriate after finishing the unit on oskillaiton. Inspired by the Tacoma Bridge collapse (1st video) Shawn Frayne designed a small wind generator that uses an oskillating tensioned belt to generate energy from the wind (2nd video).

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqK2r5bPFTM&feature=related

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqK2r5bPFTM&feature=related

    http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/solar-wind/4224763

    In 10mph of wind the design produced an output of about 40 milliwatts (true facts) and assuming the system is perfectly efficient, has an amplitude of about 2.5cm, and a belt with mass 4g (these are just assumptions) we may be able to find the frequency of the oskillating belt.

    Let's gather some formulas:

    We have power and P = W/t

    W = ΔKE

    When the belt passes through equilibrium Etotal = KE = (1/2)mv^2.

    vmax (which occurs at equilibrium) = Aω

    ω = 1/T

    T = second/cycle

    Now if we put them together, focusing on the time t it takes the belt to travel from the amplitude to equilibrium (T/4) we can say that:

    P = [(1/2)m(Aω)^2 - 0] / (T/4)

    P = 2m(A^2)(1/T)^3

    T^3 = (2mA^2)/P

    T^3 = 2(0.004kg)(0.025m)^2/(0.040W)

    T^3 = 0.000125s^3 (It's always a good sign when your units work)

    T = 0.05s

    Furthermore, with f = 2π/T we get a frequency of about 126 Hz.

    Considering that much of the energy of the belt is lost we can assume that to produce the same milliwatts it oskillates much faster meaning a smaller period and a faster frequency.

  18. antonio_morales
    Latest Entry

    Taking a shower also involves physics in many different ways. The only way the water can get out of the faucet and turn on is using some kind of force that exerts the water upwards to take a shower. Also, the different temperatures are important too so when you are turning it to warm or cold that involves friction making it not too easy to turn it so you don't make it too hot or cold.

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    CMaggio
    Latest Entry

    Lacrosse is a contact sport in which players use cradle and pass the ball to score. Players can use their bodies to check or delay other players on the field. Also, players can “check” other players’ sticks with their own sticks in order to loosen the ball from the stick’s pocket. I play attack so the sole goal of my playing is to shoot and score.

    The top arm exerts a pushing force on the shaft, the bottom arm a pulling force, creating a type of lever. This forces the head forwards which creates centripetal and the force propells the ball outward. And of course, after the ball finally leaves the stick, there is air friction. Also, the more kinetic energy the throw has, the great distance the ball will trave, especially with a shorter and lighter stick, the ball is much easier thrown.

    Lastly, when we lose possession or I am forced to play defense, when I hit an opponent, the force that I use will be equivalent to the force she applies to me.

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    blog-0799203001395027084.jpegSince grade school I have been taught that math is in everything you do. Since the beginning of this semester of taking physics, I have learned that physics is involved in every single thing. When my class learned kinematics, my thought process of things change. Now when I see an object fall or thrown I think of the math that goes into its free fall or its projectile motion. When I'm driving I also think about my velocity and acceleration in my car. Since learning physics, it has taught me a lot and has also changed my perspective on the world.
  19. colbydick
    Latest Entry

    Batman, being one of the few comic book heroes without actual powers, has connected with thousands of people over the years because of this fact. Instead of using Super-strength or Super-speed he relies on his superior intellect and gadgets to defeat his enemies. Most notable of his gadgets is his cape. His cape has gone through several changes over the years. From being just plain cloth, to fireproof and bulletproof cloth , to being given a flexible skeleton to use as a glider. The latter can exist in the real world because it acts just as a hang glider works. By increasing the surface area of his falling self there is more drag due to air friction thus slowing his decent to a gentle glide. So, if given the technological means, gliding vigilantes could exist in this world.

  20. Physics?

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    willpaggs
    Latest Entry

    We use cell phones everyday. We look at our phones constantly. Iphone users look at their phones 3x more than normal phone users.

    The cell phone uses circuits to power it. It uses waves from cell towers so we're able to call and send messages and stuff. The screen gives off light waves which is what we see when we look at our screens.

    We take advantage of technology. We use things without thinking. We learn how to do things fast, but we don't really know how it all works,

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