3. Place one of the wooden sticks horizontally over the crater, which has been made. Place the other wooden stick vertically in the crater, which has been made. Make a pencil mark where the two sticks cross. This gives the depth of the crater.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 at 10cm intervals (20cm, 30cm etc) up to 50cm.
5. Record in Results Table
FAIR TEST?
The factors, which would effect the size of a crater, are:
· The weight of the ball bearing
· The size of the ball bearing
· The depth of the sand
· The material which makes the ball bearing
· Speed at which the ball bearing is thrown
In order to make this experiment as fair as possible I am going to vary the height of the ball bearings at 10cm intervals. I am going to use the same ball bearing and the same depth of sand throughout in order to make this a controlled, fair test.
PREDICTION
I predict that, in this experiment, the higher the ball bearing the greater the size of the crater. The scientific knowledge which supports this is that the Ball Bearing has Gravitational Potential Energy and so when it is higher up it gains even more energy and this has a greater force on the sand which will make the bigger crater.
RESULTS TABLE
This is my table of results for the experiment. I have obtained evidence from these results by drawing a graph. This will enable me to analyse my results more clearly.
ANALYSIS
The factor, which I decided to concentrate on for this particular experiment, was how height effected the size of a crater. In my prediction I stated that the higher up the Ball bearing the greater the size of the crater. This was based on the scientific knowledge that as the Ball Bearing gets higher it gains more Gravitational Potential Energy, therefore there is a bigger force which in turn will make the size of the crater bigger.
I am pleased because by looking at the Results Table above, it is clear to see that the higher up the Ball bearing the bigger the crater. This supports what I predicted using the knowledge I already had.
EVALUATION
I am quite pleased with the results that I have obtained. There are no anomalous ones which is good and I feel that the procedure was fairly good although there are quite a few ways in which the method could be improved. For example you could take a wider range of readings or repeat the experiment a few more times in order to be more accurate. You could drop the Ball Bearings with different amounts of force to see if that would make a difference to the results.
The procedure is quite reliable however there are certain things, which could be done to make this experiment more realistic in relation to craters on the moon. For example you could have the force coming down in different directions, as this is what it would be like on the moon. However in this method we only dropped the ball bearings from one particular direction. There are also a few factors, which have to be considered. For example the moon is not made of sand however we used sand in this experiment. The moon is not flat either and the tub of sand we used in the experiment was actually flat. The meteors were also even in the experiment and they wouldn't be even on the moon and there would be no gravity on the moon either.
There were a couple of anomalous results in my graph. This could be due to the fact that I did not measure the size of the crater carefully enough or I did not pay enough attention when dropping the Ball Bearing from different heights. In order to resolve this I would need to repeat the experiment to obtain a wider range of results.
Despite all of these factors we are able to make some kind of conclusions from the experiment. It was useful to see how different factors effect the size of craters on the moon and with further repetition and ranges of readings this experiment could be improved.
