Projectile Animation

A projectile is an object fired or thrown by force. Play with the sliders to see how a projectile moves:

Parabola

When drag is zero the projectile's path is a parabola.

Try different angles, which angle takes the projectile furthest along? So what angle should you throw at if you want a ball to go far away?

Can you hit the same spot using different power/angle combinations?

Drag

A moving projectile gets slowed down by the air (or water etc) that it moves through. This is called "drag", and is actually a complicated subject.

Here we just use the simple approximation that drag is proportional to the square of the velocity.