Forces and Motion
Acceleration
Description
When the Space Shuttle is launched the main goal is to quickly accelerate it to a high enough velocity to enter orbit around the Earth.
Changes in movement require a force. That’s right, nothing in the universe moves without some force being applied to it at some time. We just saw that speed or velocity is a change in distance divided by a change in time (v = d / t). Now, we introduce a new term, “acceleration”. When you apply a force to an object, the object accelerates. Acceleration is just the change in velocity divided by the change in time.
We can write it this way:
acceleration =velocity——————
time a = v—t This should look vaguely familiar since it is very similar to the equation for velocity. In this way, all accelerations are AVERAGE accelerations because to compute acceleration you must have a change in time even if it is a very small change.
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