Dropping Marbles in Flower: Crater Lab

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

Hypothesis: Speed, mass, velocity, vastness, ground texture.

Materials:
-Safety Goggles - Tray - Flour - Notebook - Spoon
- Small and large marbles
- Ruler (cm)
- Excel and Word

Terms:
Floor: Bowl shaped or flat,characteristically below surrounding ground level unless fulled in with lava.
Ejecta: Blanket of material surrounding the crater that was excavate during the impact event. Ejecta become thinner away from the crater.
Raised Rim: Rock thrown out of the crater and deposited as a ring-shaped pile of debris at the crater's edge during the explosion and excavation of an impact event.
Walls: Characteristically steep and may have giant stairs called terraces.
Rays: Bright streaks starting from a crater and extending away for great distances. See Copernicus crater for another example.
Central Uplifts: Mountains formed because of the huge increase and rapid decrease in pressure during the impact event. They occur only in the center of raters that are larger than 40 Km diameter. See Tycho crater for another example.

Part 1:

1. Put on goggles and apron. Fill the pan with 2.5 cm of flour.
   
2. Drop a small marble into the flour. What did you observe? Drop another marble again. What happens when they overlap? When you throw it next to one it creates a larger crater and indent.
3. Think about guiding question. What does affect the appearance of an impact crater?
   
4. Decide on which materials you will use and collect them all to take your station. You will make a model to test the guiding question.
   
5. You will need to collect some qualitative (using senses to make observations) and quantitative - numerical data (height of drop, mass of the object, diameter of crater, depth of the crater, length of ejecta if possible to measure, etc...)
   
6. Make a data table in your notebook.
   
7. Run you lab according to the method provided.

Data Table:


Conclusion
One very strange thing that i noticed while making my observations was that the higher you dropped the marble from it would bounce out. This would create to craters, though the second crater was very small compared to the first it was still two craters that were created by just one marble! So in coclusion i think that what really changes the appearance of a crater is the distance, speed, weight, and angle.

Further Inquiry:
Some other things that i would like to try, is measuring how the size of the crater varies, and how using other materials as craters would make an impact. I think that this would be interesting because by changing the material as well as the size the weight/mass would be altered causing, maybe, craters with different appearances.