Sorry, we could not find this page | RIT CIS - Center for Imaging Science

Sorry, we could not find this page

We apologize, but the page you were looking for is not available. Most of our material is available from the menus above.

Last Modified: 2:01pm 10 Aug 11

How fast do you have to throw a rock to make it leave the Earth?

What goes up, must come down. Or must it?

  1. How fast do you have a throw a rock upwards so that it reaches a height of 10 m? Use the equation

  2. How fast do you have to throw a rock upwards so that it reaches a height of 10,000,000 m? You can't use the regular equation for gravitational potential energy

    any more, because the gravitational acceleration is no longer g = 9.8 m/s^2 at large distances above the surface of the Earth. Instead, you must do it the hard way, accounting for the varying force of gravity all the way up:

  3. How fast do you have to throw a rock upwards so that it reaches a height of infinity, and never comes back? We call this the "escape velocity" of the Earth.

  4. You find yourself standing on the surface of a spherical asteroid, with mass M = 0.6 x 10^(13) kg and radius R = 1000 m. Can you jump off into space and never come back?

  5. (optional) Asteroids have a typical density rho = 2000 kg per cubic meter. Suppose that you can leap upwards at v = 3 m/s. What is the maximum radius of an asteroid from which you can escape?
Sorry, we could not find this page | RIT CIS - Center for Imaging Science

Sorry, we could not find this page

We apologize, but the page you were looking for is not available. Most of our material is available from the menus above.

Last Modified: 2:01pm 10 Aug 11

Adapted from Prof. Michael Richmond.