Make an Impact!!!

Earth Craters 

Moon Craters  

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:

The factors that will affect the appearance of an impact crater are how much force of the creator and how big the creator is.

Materials:

Safety goggles, tray, flour, notebook, spoon, small marbles, ruler, excel and word.

Terms to know:

 Floor:

Bowl shaped or flat, characteristically below surrounding ground level unless filled in with lava.

Ejecta:

Blandet of material surrounding the crater that was excavate during the impact event. Ejecta become thinner away from the creator.

Raised Rim:

Rock thrown out of a crater and extending away for great distances.

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 creators that are larger than 40 km diameter.

Rays:

Bright streaks starting from a crater and extending away for great distances.

Walls:

Characteristically steep and may have giant stairs called terraces

Part 1:

Data Table:

Trial	Height of drop	Diameter of crater	Length of Ejecta	Depth of Crater	Observations
1	30	1 cm	Barely visible	1cm	The round object
2	30	1 cm	Same	1cm	Made the crater
3	30	1 cm	Same	1cm	Look very round.
4	30	1 cm	Minimal amount	1cm	Little Ejecta,

Trial	Height of drop	Diameter of crater	Length of Ejecta	Depth of Crater	Observations
1	60	2.0	Little more than previous	1.2	Bigger than 1st
2	60	2.5	Same	1.2
3	60	1.0	Same	1.6	Same diameter
4	60	1.5	Little	1.4	Little deeper

Trial	Height of drop	Diameter of crater	Length of Ejecta	Depth of Crater	Observations
1	90	2.0	More than 2 test	1.25	Bigger crater
2	90	2.0	Same	1.6	Could see difference
3	90	1.6	Same	1.9	Wider
4	90	1.7	Little more	1.8

Trial	Height of drop	Diameter of crater	Length of Ejecta	Depth of Crater	Observations
1	200	2.0	Even more	2.6	Extremely deep
2	200	2.4	Same	2.7	As it dropped
3	200	2.9	Same	3.0	Picked up energy
4	200	3.0	Biggest	2.8	Faster

Graphs:

Data Analysis:

1.       If the impactor were dropped from 6 meters, would the crater be larger or smaller? How much larger or smaller? Explain your answer. Note: the velocity of the impactor would be 1,084 centimeters per second?

The crater would be larger because it is dropped from further up so the marble with gain speed throughout the long trip down. When it was dropped by two meter the depth was 3 cm, so making an estimated guess, the meter would be about 6 cm in depth.  We found that in our data the father that we dropped the marble, the bigger the creator got, also we saw a lot more Ejecta.

2.        What are your observations?

Trial 1 we focus on the height of the marble which was 30 cm. When we tested the marble the diameter was an average of 1 cm or 10 mm, the depth of the creator was also the same. Our observations that there were very little Ejecta. When we compared this to our trail number four which was at a height of 200 cm or 20 mm, the diameter of the creator was 3.0, and the depth of the creator was 2.8. As you can see there is a huge difference between the first trial and 4^th trial. With our graph that we created on excel, this showed us a very big liner graph of the increased trails. On the side Julia and I did some extra experiments, we tested what the creator would look like when the flour was higher. We observed that the creator was a lot deeper and there were little Ejecta.

3.       What are the factors that affect the appearance of impact creators?

The factors that affect the appearance of impact creators are how fast the creator is going (other words and what shape the creator is. Think of it as play dough. If you have a flat piece of it laying on your table and you take your knuckle and pound it on to it once. What shape is it going to be? It is going to be the shape of your knuckle. That is one factor that affects the appearance of creators; the other factor is how fast the asteroid is going to hit earth or the moon. Take for example a car crash, when a car is going super fast and hits something there is going to be more of an impact. If the car is going slow and crashes, then there is going to be less damage.

The meteorites that hit the moon and earth are not round in space; in fact they are the complete opposite. The reason why they are in a round shape is because when they come thought the atmosphere, because of how fast it is going, the rock is melted into a round shape.

Further Inquiry:

I wonder what would happen if a meteorite hit earth’s oceans, and because of the seismic waves, I bet huge tsunamis would’ve occurred.  I think that would be a very cool experiment. With holes in the atmosphere will it be easier for asteroids to get into our world? I wonder that is why Australia has so many creators. Maybe the atmosphere is weaker in that area of our world. It will get even weaker because of global warming; will that mean that Australia will have more chances of a new creator? I think ONLY time will tell.

Google Earth:

Barringer Metor Crater:

Formed 50,000 years ago

.75 miles

Manicouagan Crater:

Oldest known craters on Earth

34 miles

Clearwater Lakes

Formed by a pair of asteroids hitting the Earth’s surface

18 miles bigger one

12 miles smaller one

Chicxulub

Burided below sediment, leaves dark shadow on the land.

Miles unknown

Upheaval Dome

Thought to be a salt dome

2.6 miles

Rio Caurto

Shape looks elliptical

Miles Unkown

Gosses Bluff

Australia belived to be more than 140 million years old

3.1 miles

Tenoumer

Creator in Africa, lines up with 2 other creators in the region

1.4 Miles

Vredefort

Multiple ring structure.

Miles Unkown