Lab 2: Air Tracks and Sextants

Sextants

Trigonometry Warm Up.

1. You stand 50 meters away from a flag pole. You have to look at an angle of 53 degrees from the horizon to see the top of the pole. What is the pole's height?
2. You stand 75 meters away from a tree that's 100 meters tall. At what angle must you tilt your head so that you look straight at the top of the tree?

Applied Trigonometry

1. Grab a sextant (or two). Go outside and figure out how to use it. (Read the manual and talk to me.)
2. Measure the height of the large pine tree on the North end of the field between the dorms and the arts and sciences building.

Air Tracks

1. Review the textbook's discussion of mass in Section C2.6.

Play with Air Tracks

Don't worry about getting terribly precise results. However, do make velocity measurements as well as you can. For each scenario, find the velocities and check to see if momentum is conserved or not.

1. Level the air track.
2. Take a cart and give it a shove. What happens to the cart? Explain the motion using the language of chapter C2.
3. Reproduce the experiment discussed in Figure C2.2.
4. Reproduce the experiment discussed in Figure C2.3.
5. Reproduce the experiment discussed in Figure C2.5.
6. Set up the situation used to measure mass as described in the text. Try it out using at least two different test objects. Estimate the velocities as best you can. (This probably won't be that well---don't worry about it.) Then calculate the masses of the two different test objects. What units is your answer in?

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