Projectile motion is what happens when you throw, launch, or kick something into the air and let gravity take over. A basketball leaving your hand, a golf ball off the tee, a water balloon flying across the yard. Once it leaves your hand, two things decide where it lands:
This projectile motion calculator breaks that down into three numbers you actually care about:
Every projectile motion problem starts by splitting the initial velocity (v₀) into two directions, horizontal (v₀x) and vertical (v₀y). Once you have those, the rest follows from four simple equations.
Here, g is gravity. On Earth that’s 9.81 m/s². The angle θ is measured from the ground, so a launch straight up is 90° and a launch along the ground is 0°.
Follow these following steps to calculate projectile motion
Enter your initial velocity, and pick the unit it’s in (m/s, km/h, ft/s, or mph).
Enter the launch angle in degrees or radians.
Add a starting height if the object isn’t launching from ground level. Leave it blank if it is.
You’ll get the max height, flight time, and range instantly in result box, along with the full step-by-step math
Say you’re a student prepping for an AP Physics exam, and your homework has a question like this: “A ball is thrown at 20 m/s at a 45° angle. Find the max height, flight time, and range.”
Instead of working through sine, cosine, and squaring numbers by hand and hoping you didn’t slip a decimal somewhere, you punch 20 into the velocity box and 45 into the angle box. The calculator returns a max height of 10.20 meters, a flight time of 2.88 seconds, and a range of 40.79 meters, and it shows every step so you can check your own work line by line before the test.
That’s the real value of this projectile motion tool. You’re not just getting an answer. You’re seeing exactly how it was built, so you can catch your own mistakes before your teacher does. Full detail breakdown
45 degrees gives you the longest range when the object launches and lands at the same height. Anything higher or lower than that trades range for extra height or extra speed.
No. Like most projectile motion problems in a classroom setting, this tool assumes no air resistance and constant gravity. Real objects, like a thrown baseball, will land slightly short of these numbers because of drag.
Yes. Enter a starting height in the “Initial Height” field, and the calculator adjusts the flight time and range using the extended formula for non-zero starting heights.
Max height is how high the object goes before gravity pulls it back down. Range is how far it travels horizontally before it lands. This calculator gives you both, along with the flight time between them.