Make An Impact lab

Make an Impact Lab

Making an Impact Lab

6/10/2011

Luka Luketic

Guiding Question: What are the factors that affect the appearance of impact crater? How do scientists use craters to tell the relative age of them?

Hypothesis: I think that the factors affecting the appearance of the craters are velocity, the angle of impacts and the size and shape of the meteor. If two craters overlap, scientists find the raise on the craters that is the method of dating the craters.

Materials: Safety goggles, tray, flour, notebook, spoon, small and large marbles, ruler (cm), Excel and Microsoft word.

Data Table:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22973019/DEPTH.pdf

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22973019/Crater%20diameter.pdf

These are the two graphs are mad

The data tables above are taken directly from the data we collected outside. The first one represents the height of the drop when compared to the depth of the crater and the second table represents the craters diameter compared to the drop height. I concluded that as the height of the drop increased so did the depth of the crater and so did the diameter of the crater. I believe that this is so because if you drop something from 2 meters it will gain speed and leave a greater crater than a marble dropped from 90 centimetres.

Data Analysis:

I have mentioned previously that the height of the drop does affect the depth and the diameter of the crater. This is easy to predict because if you think of dropping a piano from 30 meters and from 130 meters there is a difference. The piano is going to take more damage if it is dropped from 130 meters than from 30 because gravity pulls it down more and more and eventually it gains speed causing it to hit the surface harder. At first I thought that it depends more on the shape of the object but then I realized that its more up to the drop height.

Conclusion:

Along with my fellow impact crater scientists I have learnt that objects dropped from a higher distance would have a deeper and wider crater. As I have guessed the size does affect the size of the crater because a larger object will always leave a larger hole than a smaller one. But my un answered question is: does the angle affect the size of the crater.

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Further Inquiry:

If I were to repeat this lap I would definitely make it on a grander scale using real dirt and having real rocks. The results may vary because rocks have organic shapes meaning that some parts may leave craters of greater depth. While the dirt is denser than the flour, this would affect the results because with the flour it is easier for any object to create a crater while in dirt you need to have more speed and weight to cause a hole as large as the one caused in the flour.