Science | Science Experiment of the Week 7 | 278 - Make a Crater

Experiment with making craters using flour and colored powders.

This Week's Experiment - #278 Make a Crater

These experiments are from Robert Krampf - The Happy Scientist

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 this site:

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.

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