A 0.250 kilogram box has a speed of 2m/s when it is 1.2 meters from a second mass. It is sliding on a table with a coefficient of friction of 0.20. The box collides and sticks to a 0.5kg box that sits on the end of the table, causing the boxes to fall. How fast are the boxes going after they stick together? What is the speed of the (stuck together) boxes just before they hit the ground. The top of the table is 0.75m from the ground.
Do this in three steps:
(1) Subtract the frictional work from the initial kinetic energy of the 0.250 kg box, to get its energy and velocity before impact.
(2) Use conservation of momentum to compute the (horizontal) velocity of the stuck-together masses after collision.
(3) The horizontal velocity of the two masses will stay the same as they fall, but the vertical velocity will increase to sqrt(2 g H), where H = 0.75 m
The speed at ground impact will be the vector sum of the vertical and horizontal velocity components