A 1st physics analysis of Angry Bird Space

Rhett Allain looks into the physics of the game Angry Bird Space:

One of the things I love about analyzing games like Angry Birds Space is that you have some freedom to create little experiments, but you can't just do whatever you want. This is a lot like real-life science. Maybe I want to build a gravitational wave detector. Ideally, it would be the size of the Earth. However, building such a thing is just not so simple. We have to settle for something else. So, what is my "experiment"? One of the problems I had with the previous analysis was that the forces were always changing directions. How do you fix that? Make a bird move in just one dimension….

(Thanks to investigator Gregg Weil for bringing this to our attention.)