Core Earth Science Students Model Impact Craters

Impact craters are geologic structures formed when a large meteoroid, asteroid or comet smashes into a planet or a satellite. All the inner bodies in our solar system have been heavily bombarded by meteoroids throughout their history. The surfaces of the Moon, Mars and Mercury, where other geologic processes stopped millions of years ago, record this bombardment clearly. On the Earth, however, which has been even more heavily impacted than the Moon, craters are  continually erased by erosion and redeposition as well as by volcanic resurfacing and tectonic activity. Thus only about 120 terrestrial impact craters have been recognized, the majority in geologically stable craters of North America, Europe and Australia where most exploration has taken place. Spacecraft orbital imagery has helped to identify structures in more remote locations for further investigation.

Meteor Crater (also know as Barringer Crater) in Arizona was the first-recognized terrestrial impact crater, currently 170 impact craters have been identified on the Earth.

The students were using six different types of projectiles to form their impact craters. They dropped them from different heights, calculated their kinetic energies, made measurements of diameter and depth of the craters.  They will use this data to compare the craters formed by different projectiles.

Construction papers are used to try to capture the rays formed by the materials that are thrown out of the point of impact.

Crater with its "projectile" still intact. The projectiles used were of different sizes and made of materials with different masses.

Matt D. Vivian M. Danny G and Xiao H. are obviously enjoying the controlled destruction they can mete out to their model planet surface. You can see some of the varied "projectiles" in the weighing cup on the lab table.

Brendan W. and Jack M. are carefully removing the "projectile" before measuring its dimensions