physics

This worksheet will guide you through how to download Google Earth, how to navigate to each impact crater, how to measure the diameter of each crater and to put the sizes of these craters into perspective. You will then be asked to calculate the kinetic energies involved in some of the impacts which have created these craters.

What will I need for this activity?

• Google Earth - download from: http://earth.google.com/

Back Down 2 Earth (BD2E) is an expansion of the existing Down 2 Earth (D2E) education project which teaches school students aged 11-19 about the geological side to astronomy. In this 46-page booklet you will learn about the wonders of comets and asteroids and the possible destruction that these bodies can cause on planets such as our own.

View this as a web-page (some material omitted).

In this activity students will work out how long it takes light to travel from comet Tempel 1 to Earth and how long after the collision in the Deep Impact mission we will see this event.

Objectives

Students will:

The aim of this activity is to use vectors and Pythagoras’ theorem to work out the speed at which an impactor hits a comet.

The aim of this activity is to calculate the kinetic energy of an impact and to learn how the kinetic energy changes when the weight of an impactor is altered.

Investigate the factors that influence the viscosity(runniness) of treacle. How does this relate to the different shapes of volcanoes that can be found on the Earth and on Mars?

This lesson allows pupils to create impact craters in layered dry materials. Pupils can perform controlled experiments by varying the velocity or mass of crater-forming objects and observing and measuring their effects.

Aims