Bryce+S

**The Search for Life on Mars**
//by Bryce S//

**VIDEO SUMMARIES:**

** From Big Bang to Galaxies: **

Before planets or stars or even atoms, there was a tiny, incredibly dense, and incredibly hots ball of energy in space. It then exploded into quarks, which created protons, electrons, and neutrons. The temperature dropped slowly as time passed, and eventually it cooled down enough for the particles to form atoms without them breaking apart becau se of the heat. They then clumped together into big balls of gas and these gas clouds were galaxies. When the gas atoms clumped together to make a galaxy, the gas then formed a spiral around a central clump of the gas in that galaxy. Galaxies used to be closer together, but they have gradually spread out over time. However, there is still a possibility that our galaxy can collide with another sometime in the future.

** The Milky Way Galaxy: **

The galaxy that our solar system is in is called the Milky Way. At night, you can sometimes see a curved line of stars in the sky. The Milky Way is made up of a disc surrounding a central bulge of compacted stars and gas clouds. It is thought that in the center of our galaxy, there is a black hole. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years long, and our sun is about halfway between the center and the edge of the disc. On the opposite side of the center, there is a dwarf galaxy merging with the Milky Way. The galaxy has four arms that go out from the central bulge in a spiral. Most of the stars in our galaxy stay clumped into these four arms. The arms contain stars, gas, dust, and rotate around the central bulge in a spiral.

** History of the Solar System: **

When the sun was first surrounded by a ring dust, there were small rocks floating around it in space. Some of the rocks fused together when the ran into each other and some of them broke apart. Eventually, the rock clumps got to be a few kilometers across and were known as planetesimals. In what is now the outer solar system, four giant masses formed - these became Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. These giant planets grew discs of their own out of which moons condensed. The large mass of these planets allowed their gravitational pull to attract and hold onto a thick atmosphere of gas which became the ring. The smaller planets' metal sank to the center while the lighter rock rose to the surface. They then cooled off and solidified. Our moon was probably created by a collision between the newly formed earth and another planet. The surface of rocky moons and planets were cratered by constant crashes with small planetesimals. Most of these planetesimals either exited to the remote outer solar system, settled in the asteroid belt in between Jupiter and Mars, or became moons. The icy planetesimals from the outer solar system became comets if they reach the warmer area around the sun. Rings around giant planets are probably the result of small planetesimals and asteroids that got broken apart by gravity.

** ROCKET HISTORY SUMMARY: **

Stories of early rocket-like devices appear throughout the historical records of various cultures, but when the first true rockets appeared is unclear. One of these devices employed the principles essential to rocket flight and was called an aeolipile. It was invented around 100 B.C. by the Greek inventor Hero of Alexandria. A sphere was mounted on top of a water kettle. A fire below the kettle turned the water into steam, and the gas traveled through pipes to the sphere. Two L-shaped tubes on opposite sides of the sphere allowed the gas to escape, which caused the sphere to rotate.

In the first century A.D., the Chinese would load a simple form of gunpowder into bamboo tubes and toss them into fires to create explosions at religious festivals. Some of the tubes did not explode and instead launched out of the fires, propelled by the gases and sparks produced by the burning gunpowder. They then started to experiment with these gunpowder-filled tubes by attaching them to arrows and launching them with bows. Soon after, they discovered that the tubes could launch even without the bows because of the power produced by the escaping gas. This was the first true rocket.

In 1898, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposed the idea of traveling through space with rockets. For his ideas, research, and vision, he has been called the father of modern astronautics. Early in the 20th century, Robert H. Goddard became interested in a way to achieve higher altitudes than were possible for balloons. Early on, Goddard performed many experiments involving solid-propellant rockets, but then realized that it would be better if liquid fuel was used. On March 16, 1926, Goddard achieved the first successful flight with a liquid-propellant rocket, which was the forerunner of a whole new era in rocket flight.

In the early 20th century, many countries were evolving the rocket including Germany. The Society for Space Travel in Germany developed the V-2 rocket, which was used against London in World War II. This rocket achieved its great thrust by burning a mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol at a very fast rate. Once launched, a V-2 could cause devastation to entire city blocks. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed after the United States followed the Soviet Union in making a space satellite of its own. Since its formation, NASA has sent people, animals, and machines into space.

All around the world, rockets have been developing and have evolved from gunpowder tubes to the giant, space-traveling rockets we know today. The evolution of rockets has opened the doors of space exploration to humans.

**ROCKET STAGES:**

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Press the green flag to restart and the red button to stop.


 * EXPLORATION OF MARS SUMMARY: **

Over the last few hundred years, humans have been researching about the Martian System and recently, our knowledge about this has increased dramatically thanks to space probes sent from earth in the late 20th century. The Mars 1M program was the first Soviet unmanned spacecraft exploration program to a different planet, which consisted of two flyby probes launched towards Mars in October 1960. Although this mission was successful, some of them were not. Mars 1962A was a Mars fly-by mission launched on October 24, 1962 and Mars 1962B a lander mission launched in late December of the same year. Both failed from breaking up as they were exiting the earth's orbit. The Soviet Union sent many more probes in the late 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1990s, NASA has also been sending probes and orbiters to Mars. In 2001, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter arrived. Its mission is to use spectrometers and imagers to hunt for evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity on Mars. In 2002, the probe's gamma ray spectrometer and neutron spectrometer had detected large amounts of hydrogen, indicating that there is ice in the soil or Mars. With the research and exploration of Mars progressing this quickly, it won't be long before we start sending //people // to Mars, too.



**MY LABELED ROCKET:**



**ROCKET FLIGHT SUMMARY:**



The purpose of this experiment was to determine how the mass of a rocket affects how high it flies. I hypothesized that the more mass, the higher the rocket would fly. In class, we split up into seven groups and each group made their own rocket. We then all painted our rockets differently. All of the rockets were the same mass until they were painted, but the masses varied greatly when they were completely done. The apogees of the rockets after they were launched varied from 43 to 87 meters high. The result was that the hypothesis was mostly correct because if one of the flights was taken out of the equation, the greater the mass of the rocket, the higher it flew. The mass of our rocket was 47.7 grams and the apogee of our rocket was 71.3 meters in altitude, which was the third highest out of seven rockets. I thought that our rocket flew very well considering the fact that one of the fins was glued on a little higher than it was supposed to be, so the rocket was tilted a little. Also, when the rocket was on its way down, the parachute did not open up as well as it probably should have.

**ROCKET FIN EXPERIMENT:**

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This follow-up experiment was done to see if the number of fins affects the maximum altitude of the rocket, and again to see if the mass affects the altitude. As you can see from the graph above, there might have been a small inverse relationship between the flights, but it is not very constant. In the graph below, there did not really seem to be any relationship between the points. Our rocket had a mass of 56.9 g, and was 7 m high at its apogee, which was fifth out of seven rockets. It also had 10 fins, tied for the most of all the rockets. From this experiment, it seemed like the more fins the rocket had, the lower its maximum altitude was. It also seemed like out of the rockets with similar amounts of fins, the greater the mass, the higher it went.



**ROBOTICS HISTORY: **

Robotics is the branch of technology that involves the design, construction, and operation of robots and computer systems. It also involves the control, sensory feedback, and information processing of the computer systems. The word robot was first introduced by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play Rossum's Universal Robots, which was published in 1920. In the 1930s, the humanoid robot Elektro exhibited at the 1939 and 1940 world fairs, and this was really what kicked off the creation of robots.



In 1948, simple robots exhibiting biological behaviors were introduced, and in 1956, the first commercial robot was released from the Unimation company. In the mid-1970s, the first programmable universal manipulation arms were created. This was an important point in robotics history because this means that these robots had to be able to pick up, modify, or destroy objects. These types of programmable robots are still evolving today, and so is the ability to control the robot and the sensory feedback and information processing of the computer systems.




 * PROGRAMMING ROBOTS: **

To program these Lego Mindstorms robots, we can either use the Mindstorms program on our tablets or use the NXT program on the robot. If the motors connected to each of the wheels moved at the same speed, the robot would go straight forward. If the motors are moving at different speeds, the robot will turn in the direction of the side of the slower wheel. My lab partner and I programmed our robot driving in a square. The motors turned the wheels at the same speed to make the robot go forward and at different speeds to make it turn.

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 * GEOLOGY ON MARS: **

There are many different ways that geologists identify rocks and minerals. Some properties of the rocks and minerals that can help us to identify them are color, luster, hardness, texture, light refraction, magnetism, streak, taste, and cleavage. While most of these are just things that can be observed, hardness can actually be measured by using the Mohs Scale. The Mohs Scale is a scale from 1-10 that measures the harness of rocks and minerals with talc at 1 and diamond at 10. Luster is the way light reflects off a rock or mineral, and light refraction is how transparent it is. Texture is how the rock feels, and cleavage is how the rock breaks apart. If the rock breaks apart in clean sheets, it has good cleavage, but if it just crumbles apart, it does not. Magnetism is how much the rock or mineral attracts to iron, nickel, cobalt, or a magnetized object. Streak is the color of the line of dust left behind when a rock or mineral is scraped on a streak plate or other hard surface. Taste is also sometimes used to identify rocks and minerals. For example, two minerals that look the same, have the same streak, and are not magnetic can be tasted to identify them. Geologists use tools like compasses, rock hammers, and hand lenses to examine rocks on the Earth. They also sometimes to simple acid tests to see what the rocks are made of.



To analyze and try to identify rocks and minerals on Mars, NASA sent the rover Curiosity to Mars. First, it would dig small holes in rocks and collect the powder to see if it contained any organic material. Next, it would shoot a laser at a rock to see how the light reflects off the rock. This could help to identify the chemical composition of the rock. They can also take small samples of the rocks and try to identify them using the tools geologists use on Earth.




 * LIFE ON MARS: **

There are eight things that something must possess to be living. They have to be made of cells, need materials, are homeostatic, respond to stimuli, reproduce, grow, adapt, and respire. Cells are the fundamental units of living things. There are different types of cells: Animal cells, plant cells, and bacteria cells. All living things must also take in materials; they need water, minerals, and air. For a living thing to be homeostatic, it means that internally, the living things stay about the same despite environmental changes. Responding to stimuli basically means reacting to your surroundings. All living things must to this to some degree. All living things must also reproduce, which is when organisms produce offspring of their own kind. Plants and animals reproduce in a variety of ways. All living things must also grow, which is to develop from a lower or simpler to a higher or more complex form. Not all living things grow at the same rate or grow to be the same size. All living things must also adapt to their environment to make them suited for their way of life. Finally, respiration is releasing energy stored in the chemical bonds of sugars. So if you want to know if something is living or not, just ask yourself if it has these qualities.



There are a few strategies used to detect life on other planets like Mars. The Viking probes of the mid-1970s were sent to Mars to carry out experiments designed to detect microorganisms in the soil. The tests were made to look for microbial life similar to that found on the Earth. Gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers are tools designed to identify natural organic matter, and these tools were used during the Viking missions on Mars. To detect life on Mars, instruments highly sensitive to organic materials are used by rovers on Mars.