fairfolio
Saved Projects

The Relationship between a Projectile's Kinetic Energy and the Crater's Diameter

CSEF · 2015 Physics & Astronomy Honorable_mention Award

Ashwin Kumar · Marshall (Thurgood) Middle School, San Diego, San Diego County

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective of this project is to use household materials to calculate a relationship between any crater and its projectile energy. It can be applied to save human lives. Methods/Materials The materials used in this project were tennis balls, a sand basin, measuring tools, a pegboard-prong contraption, and a balance. The pegboard-prong contraption was formed from a 5 foot pegboard attached with screws to a wall. Double hook prongs were attached to it and a PVC pipe was wedged in between. A ball was dropped from either different heights or different masses and the diameter was recorded. Results Overall, when all the points were plotted from the tests, all of the constants were found. The height testing proved to have much more accurate results than the mass testing. Since the margins for the mass testing were very low, the differences were also low and hard to measure. But using the data the equation of D = 0.0325 + 0.0489E0.2589 was formed. Conclusions/Discussion The equation relating crater diameter to projectile energy is D = 0.0325 + 0.0489E0.2589. The results of the validation to the Meteor Crater in Arizona came out a little bit less than expected, possibly because of the underestimation of the effect of mass. This information can also be applied to real-life issues. In 2013, the Chelyabinsk Meteor was a fraction of a degree from hitting Earth, and if it did, it would have destroyed an area equivalent to the size of Manhattan in New York. It can also be used to derive what caused different craters on the moon, and it shows that the Alphonsus Crater had to be caused by a projectile traveling at 20 meters per second with a mass of 600 billion kilograms. This information can be used to evacuate people until technology to stop asteroids is produced, expanding upon the knowledge about asteroids.

Summary statement

This project is designed to relate the dimensions of a projectile to the size of the crater formed.

Help received

Dad helped with building pegboard, format data

Awards (1)

  • Honorable Mention

Competition history

  • CSEF 2015 Physics & Astronomy · Entry J1715

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google