Making Meteorite Craters

Today we did an awesome experiment to find out how the size and speed of a meteorite effects the size of the impact crater.

To do this we filled a cat litter tray with flour and then added a layer of cocoa over the top. We dropped stones into the tray from above to see how they formed craters. In the first experiment we kept the drop height the same but varied the stone size. In the second experiment we kept the same stone but changed the drop height each time. We measured the craters each time.

Once we had our results the children used Excel to make a scatter graph and I showed them how to draw a line of best fit.

We concluded that bigger and faster meteorites make larger craters.