Crater Creators: How Does Asteroid Mass Affect Impact Crater Size?
Science Lab · Grade 7 · ngss
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science_lab
Pre Lab
Background: Every day, space rocks called **meteoroids** travel through our solar system at incredible speeds. When one of these rocks enters Earth's atmosphere, it becomes a **meteor**. If it survives the fiery trip through the atmosphere and strikes the ground, it is called a **meteorite**. The scar left behind on the surface is called an **impact crater**. Earth's Moon is covered with thousands of craters because it has no atmosphere to burn up incoming rocks and no weather to erode the craters away.
When an asteroid or meteorite slams into a planetary surface, it carries a large amount of **kinetic energy** — the energy of motion. This energy is transferred to the ground at the moment of impact, blasting material outward and downward to form a bowl-shaped crater. Scientists hypothesize that the more mass an impactor has, the more kinetic energy it carries (when traveling at the same speed), and therefore the larger the crater it creates. The material blasted out of the crater is called **ejecta**, and it often lands in a ring or rays around the crater.
In today's lab, you will act as a planetary scientist and build a model of asteroid impacts using flour as the planetary surface, cocoa powder as a surface layer to help visualize the impact, and spheres of different masses dropped from the same height. By keeping the drop height constant, you ensure the spheres hit the surface at the same speed, so the only variable that changes is the **mass** of the impactor. This is exactly how scientists design controlled experiments — by changing only one variable at a time. Your data will help you explain the relationship between impactor mass and crater size.
Vocabulary
Term: Impact crater
Definition: A bowl-shaped depression in a surface formed when a fast-moving object (like an asteroid or meteorite) collides with it
Term: Meteorite
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Post Lab
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