Bottle Rocket: Newton's Three Laws Of Motion

Background:

Bottle rockets are great models to examine Newton’s three laws of motion. The bottle rocket will remain on the ground until an unbalanced force, water, thrusts the rocket upward. This is defined by Newton’s first law of motion: an object at rest stays at rest or an object in motion, stays in motion (in the same direction/at the same speed) unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. It is also known as the law of inertia.

The more mass the rocket has, the less acceleration it will have using the same force. By adding a small amount of water, the force will increase. This can be described by using Newton’s second law of motion: the net force of an object is equal to the product of its mass and acceleration.

When the bottle rocket

Overall, changing the indirect variables (amount of water and the number of fins) can create huge effects on the direct variable (time of flight).

Reflection:

What worked or didn’t work and why?

The parachute of the bottle rocket deployed. It worked because it wasn’t “stuffed” into the nose cone. If it was, however, it would be stuck in the nose cone and not deploy. Even though the parachute deployed, it didn’t help the rocket decelerate too much. It was most likely because the parachute wasn’t big enough. If the parachute was made larger, the time of flight for the rocket would’ve increased.

What did you find compelling? The most compelling part of this project was when the parachute deployed. I wasn’t sure if the parachute would deploy or not. Before I launched the rocket, I made sure to put the parachute loosely in the nose cone so when the nose cone came off, the parachute wouldn’t be stuck in it. As the rocket launched, I was very excited!

What, if anything, would you change next time? The size of the parachute was a little small, so next time I think I should make the parachute larger. It would as said before, slow down the rocket more