Projectile Motion: At the high school level, students are expected to understand that the trajectory of a
projectile is the result of applying Newton’s first and second laws and the law of universal gravitation, as
indicated by the following general statement in the Benchmarks:
Newton’s system was based on the concepts of mass, force, and acceleration, his three laws of motion
relating them, and a physical law stating that the force of gravity between any two objects in the
universe depends only upon their masses and the distance between them. (BM grades 9–12, 243)