A descent vehicle landing on Mars has a vertical velocity toward the surface of Mars of 5.5m/s...?

Question

A descent vehicle landing on Mars has a vertical velocity toward the surface of Mars of 5.5m/s. At the same time, it has a horizontal velocity of 3.5m/s.

a. At what speed does the vehicle move along its descent path?
b. At what angle with the verticle is this path?

Please help me.
I don't understand how to figure this problem out.

Show each step you used. I don't understand how this problem works. Please do not use the pythagorean theorem, use trig functions instead.

Answer 1

Draw a picture of it with arrows representing the vertical and horizontal velocities as 2 legs of a right triangle. This triangle will show you that the angle with the vertical is arctan 3.5/5.5 = theta

Then the flight path V will be Vv/cos(theta) or Vh/sin(theta)

Since you're ruling out pythagoras, you really need to find the angle first, then the speed.......