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

Hypothesis: The bigger the crater the larger the meteor that caused it was. Scientists can't tell how old meters are.

Materials:

• safety goggles
• tray
• flour
• notebook
• spoon
• small and large marbles
• ruler
• excel and word
  

Procedure:

Data Graphs:



DATA ANALYSIS:

From looking at this bar graph, I can see a constant increase, and the larger the crater and the bigger the diameter the higher the marble that created it was dropped at. A pattern I noticed was that the depth of the crater and the diameter was almost always the same. If the marble was dropped from 6 meters, it would cause an increase in both the diameter and depth. That's because the marble has 6 meters space to be acted upon by gravity and to gain speed, so it's going to crash with an even greater speed in the flour. When we dropped the marble from 2 meters the diameter was 3.0 cm and the depth was 2.8 cm. If we were to do it with 6 meter drop my estimate is that it would be 9.0 cm in diameter and 8.4 cm in depth, which is three times the 2 meters. However, if we were to do this we would have to get a deeper testing tub, since the marble would reach the end of the tub easily, and then we wouldn't get accurate measurements.

CONCLUSION:

From this lab I learned that the higher up the marble is dropped from, the larger the crater is going to be. When we tested this both the depth and the diameter of the crater kept increasing. This matches my hypothesis, since I thought that the bigger the crater the higher the drop, and also the bigger the meteor or in this case marble. I also noticed that the diameter and the depth of the crater are pretty similar, and that often they're exactly the same size, or with a very little difference. I wonder if this actually relates to real life. Otherwise it might only be because we used a sphere (marble), which is a regular shape, so therefore it would be the same height and depth. A meteor probably would be more oval and irregular shaped. Also, the pieces broken off from it might form smaller craters nearby, which the marble doesn’t. I can now conclude that the factors that affect the appearance of craters are the speed they collect, the size, and the shape.