What did we do?

We asked our teacher for an idea on how to make a moonscape. She suggested putting a deep layer of flour into a cake pan, then sprinkling a thin layer of cocoa over that. We found some marbles to act as meteors and got ready to drop the marbles into the cake pan. To see if we could get different crater shapes, we decided to drop the marbles from four different heights: 50 cm, 100 cm, 150 cm and 200 cm. We then dropped three marbles from each height, so we could have several craters to examine. We measured the diameter of each crater and its depth. Finally, we compared our homemade craters to the ones we could see on the moon, using the telescope at the Yale Observatory. more...