Center of Mass

Welcome back! Today we talked about the center of mass: what it is, how to find it, and some cool things we can do with it.

Notes: Center of Mass

We also completed this short qualitative lab:

Choose at least 3 different cardboard pieces. Sketch them in your lab notebook and qualitatively find their centers of mass. Write a brief description of your procedure and mark the COM on your sketches in your notebook.

Your book does not have many problems involving only the center of mass, so I had to make up problems. Your homework is:

1.A uniform meter stick has a mass of 0.20kg.

a)Where is its center of mass?

b)A 0.30 kg mass is taped to the meter stick at the 80 cm mark. Now where is the COM of the system?
2. A young girl of mass 35 kg is 4.0 meters from the shore of a lake, standing at one end of a uniform raft of mass 90. kg and length 3.0 m. She walks along the raft away from the shore until she gets to the other end of the raft. How far is she from the shore now?

Also, a few of you asked for the address of the planets simulation some classes looked at:
My Solar System