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Snow Day!!

Snowball Fight!

By: Meghan Henseler

Who doesn't love a good snow day?  I know that I love them.  Having two this week really was great.  Over the three day weekend, my dad and I decided to make the trip up to my Grandma's condo in New Hampshire to go skiing.  I was planning on taking a nice conservation of momentum video at the ski mountain, but upon realizing that it was about 14 degrees at the base and extra windy (they literally had to shut down the gondola) we decided that it was too cold to take our mittens off.  After this sad realization, we had a great day of skiing.  I knew I couldn't leave New Hampshire without taking a good physics video, and because all I think about is learning, I asked my dad if we could have a "snowball fight" so that I could visualize conservation of momentum. I decided to take one for the team and be the one who had the snowball thrown at them (I also have horrible aim so if I was the one throwing this would have gone much worse.)

As you can see from my flinch before the snow even hits me, I love having things thrown at me!  Even more than that, I love it when stuff being thrown at me relates to physics! According to Logger Pro and my estimations of distance, I was moving at about .47 m/s before the collision.  It was pretty hard to get a good estimate of how fast I was going because there was friction where I was running, but for the sake of physics and making my life easier, we are going to pretend that I was moving on a frictionless plane and that my velocity was constant before the collision. Also, I weigh about 60 kg.  The snowball was about .5 lbs, equaling .23 kg.  The snowball was moving at about 24.1 m/s before the collision.  The question then becomes, what are the velocities of both me and the snowball after the collision?

It was hard to tell whether this was an elastic collision or an inelastic collision, but since the ball bounced off of me, I decided to use the elastic equations: m1v1+m2v2=m1v1f+m2v2f  and v1+v1f=v2+v2f.  This means that in my estimations, no KE was lost.  Now it was time for some math!
Using the conservation momentum equation and the equation we derived in class, I found that my final velocity was about .56 m/s.  I guess getting hit with the snowball really sped me up! The final velocity of the snowball was -23.07 m/s.  This makes sense because the snowball started moving in the negative x direction after hitting me.  

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