"Make an Impact" Lab

Guiding Question: What are the factors that affect the appearance of impact craters?

My Hypothesis: I think that this would depend on how fast the meteor/marble is going, how big it is, how heavy it is, and at what angle it is falling.

Materials:

• Safety goggles
• tray
• flour
• notebook
• spoon
• small and large marbles
• ruler (cm)
• Excel
• Word

I performed these tests with my lab partners, Brin, Ergi and Adrian, and here are our results:

And from that data Adrian produced these graphs:

Data Analysis: As you can easily see, all of our graphs show an increase. This means that the ejecta, the diameter, and the depth of the craters increased as the throwing height increased. It shows a bit less significantly with diameter, but the increase can be seen easily enough. 

Conclusion: My guiding question was "What are the factors that affect the appearance of impact craters?". I answered "I think that this would depend on how fast the meteor/marble is going, how big it is, how heavy it is, and at what angle it is falling." Was I correct? Well, as we dropped the marble from higher up, it had more potential energy, and therefore even more speed. We can easily see a gradual increase in our graphs, so I guess I was right. The size and mass of the marbles weren't a variable in this test so  I cannot confirm whether I was right with that. As for the angle, this cannot be seen in our data as we recorded only tests where we successfully dropped the marble, keeping only one variable, the angle has a large impact on the crater. When the marble is a bit slanted when falling, the crater tends to be more of an ellipse than a circle.