This Week's Experiment - #278 Make a Crater
This week's experiment was going to be something about rain until my
imagination was caught by the news of the near miss that Earth had recently
with a fairly large asteroid. That got me thinking about our visit to Meteor
Crater in Arizona, which reminded me of this experiment. To learn about
craters, you will need:
a large bowl or baking pan. Do not use glass.
flour or cake mix
some different colored powder
several objects to drop into the flour
If you are doing this inside, first cover the area with some newspaper. That
will make it MUCH easier to clean up afterwards. Place baking pan on the
paper and put at least two inches of flour into it. If your kitchen cabinet
is like ours, there is probably an old bag of flour somewhere in the back
that needs to be replaced anyway. If you don't have flour, you can also use
cake mix, corn meal, etc. IMPORTANT! Ask before you do this. It would be a
bad thing to use the last of the flour when someone was planning to use it
for something important, like a chocolate cake!
Use a fork to smooth the top of the flour. Now we want to sprinkle some diffe
rent colored powder on the top. If you used flour, you can top it with cocoa
powder, pepper, turmeric, etc. If you used a dark cake mix, you can top it
with a sprinkle of flour or powdered sugar. You do not have to cover the top
with this powder. You just need a light dusting, so you can see where the
flour is thrown outwards.
Pick an object to be your asteroid. This could be a marble, a small rock, a
coin, a grape, etc. In fact, you can experiment with different objects to
see whether they make different features in the crater. Hold the asteroid
about waist high and drop it into the center of the pan.
Look at the crater. Then look at some photos of real craters. You can find
some on these sites:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/photogallery-moon.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010819.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010809.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010108.html
To repeat the experiment, smooth the surface and add another sprinkle of the
cocoa powder. Try dropping several objects to see whether you can see
features which would tell you which object hit first. Try throwing an object
from the side to see whether it forms a different pattern. Compare the
crater from an object dropped from a low point with the crater from a fast
moving object. After you practice a bit, leave the room and have someone
make several craters. Then come back and see how much you can figure out by
looking at the patterns. Then look at some of the photos of the moon craters
and see what you can figure out from them.
From Robert Krampf's Science Education Company
PO Box 60982
Jacksonville, FL 32236-0982
904-388-6381
krampf@aol.com
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