Dropping Marbles -A Crater Experiment

By definition a crate is a large, bowl-shaped cavity in the ground or on the surface of a

planet or the moon caused by an explosion, the impact of a meteorite, etc. Even though this

definition slightly explains the occurrence of a meteorite, through this lab we went through

this thoroughly. We took a tub and filled with a few centimeters of flour. We then got a

meter stick and a marble. We would hold the marble up at a certain height and then drop it,

after the marble fell it would make a crater we then made recording and observations about

this. Above are graphs made out of our observations, looking at the graph now I see that our

data looks a little strange, with big drops and rises. Even though I think our data is not the

most reliable there are observations I made that are interesting. One thing I noticed during this

experiment was that the higher the marble was held, when it dropped it would actually

bounce and create a brand new crater! In conclusion, I found that what effects a crater is the

distance, speed, weight and angle that change the appearance of the crater.

Further Inquiry:

Additional tests I would like to try would be things such as, using different materials as craters

or throwing "meteorites" into different materials. This would be interesting to see how the

different materials react to each other.

Note: The graph is turned into the average of three tests.