Ceren+I+SFLOM

What is Electricity? Electricity is a fundamental entity of nature consisting of negative and positive kinds. It can be observed in the attractions and repulsions of bodies electrified by friction and in natural phenomena, and it is usually utilized in the form of electric currents. There are three types of electricity: static, current, and discharge. Static electricity is an imbalance of electric charge due to rubbing two objects together which causes the removal of electrons. Current is the flow of electric charge in a controlled manner. The flowing electric charge is made up of electrons. Lastly, discharge, or electric discharge, is the rapid movement of charge from one place to another.

Using Electricity on a Trip to Mars: There are many, many things that would require the use of electricity on a trip to Mars. There are things in the spaceship that would use electricity and there are things that you would use when you get to Mars that also require electricity to function. A few of the things in a spaceship that would need electricity to work are the lights, possibly a freezer, definitely a heater and air conditioning, a radio, the controls, and some navigation tools. Most all these things are necessary for a trip to Mars and all of them use electricity. When you get to Mars you will need to investigate and search for life. In order to do this you will need something like a rover. The rover itself and the instruments and equipment that the rover uses are all powered by electricity as well. These are only some of the many things that would require electricity on a trip to Mars, so you can imagine that there are many thing that we depend on electricity for, definitely when we plan a trip to Mars!

What is Magnetism and what can it do? Magnetism is a physical phenomenon that is produced by the motion of electric charge. It results in attractive and repulsive forces between objects. Magnets have this physical phenomenon. A piece of magnetite, which is magnetic, is called a magnet. Magnets can attract objects made or iron or steel, for example nail or screws. All magnets have to ends or poles. They have a North Pole, or side, and a South Pole, or side. The same poles or sides will repel each other while different poles attract each other. For example north poles repel one another, and south poles repel one another, but a north pole and a south pole would attract one another. People noticed magnetism thousands of years ago. They found that the mineral magnetite attracted other pieces of magnetite and bits of iron. They also discovered that when they rubbed small pieces of iron with magnetite, the iron acted like magnetite. When these pieces were free to turn, ne end would always point north. These may have been the first compasses, which is one of the many uses of magnets. Even today we sometimes still use compasses, and compasses work thanks to magnetism. There are many other uses of magnetism as well. The Earths own magnetic field protects Earth and us from dangerous particles and radiation from space by causing it to go around Earth instead. We as people use magnetism for many things, if you just look around you can find many things that we use magnetism for.



Using Magnetism on a Trip to Mars: On Mars magnetism might be useful. One thing you may think would be useful would be a compass. Of course a compass would be useful for direction and finding your way around, but unlike Earth, Mars does not really have a magnetic field, so a compass probably won't work. If Mars used to have a magnetic field though, then a compass would have worked. One way you could use magnetism though, is on a rover. Part of Mars crust consists of iron ore. Iron, as we already know, can be temporarily turned into a magnet. Or in other words it will attract to a magnet when put near one another. Maybe we could put a magnet, or even an electromagnet so you can switch the magnet on and off, on the rover. The rover could use this magnet to pick up object on Mars or even just samples of Mars crust. There could be multiple uses for magnetism on Mars, and we already use magnetism for many things on Earth. Magnetism has been so helpful to us for a very long while, and it still can be.



From Big Bang to Galaxies Our universe is an incredible thing. It's believed that our universe started about 15 billion years ago, exploding out of nothing in an event now called the Big Bang. Before the explosion the universe was packed into a space smaller than an atomic nucleus and was unimaginably hot. Particles of matter were crated when, within a fraction of a second, the universe began to expand rapidly. In a mere brief flash, it had already expanded from the size of an atom to the size of Earth. At the time it was all just a dense mixture of energy and exotic particles such as quarks and antiquarks. The universe kept expanding at a steady rate and the temperature began to gradually drop, and before the universe was even a tenth of a millisecond old, protons and neutrons began forming. As the temperature continues to drop, new particles continue forming while some are annihilated. Once three minutes is up, many of the protons and neutrons created earlier have combined to make helium nuclei. After that, very little happens for about 300,000 years except that the universe continues to expand while the temperature drops. As the temperature reaches 3,000 degrees Kelvin, electrons are finally able to start orbiting protons, hydrogen nuclei, and helium nuclei without being torn apart by the heat. Radiation is free to travel long distances across the universe and the fog, formerly produced by the electrons is gone now that they have attached to atoms. The first hints of structure begin to appear. Two billion years after the Big Bang, galaxy begin to form. There is an uneven distribution of matter, and the universe takes on a sponge-like structure. Our galaxy formed when the universe was about three billion years old. Spiral arms developed around a central bulge. Galaxies are classed according to their shape, as elliptical, spiral, or irregular. In the early universe, galaxies were much closer together than they are now and collisions and merges were quite common. In fact, someday out galaxy may collide or merge with the Andromeda Galaxy.

The Milky Way Galaxy When you look at the sky on a clear dark night, you may see a patchy band of faint light, the Milky Way. This is an insiders view of our galaxy. The light comes from a vast number of individual stars, while the dark patches are clouds of opaque dust. Looking at the Milky Way from space, there's a flat disk of stars about 100,000 light years across and 1,000 - 2,000 light years thick. An even thinner layer of gas cuts through the middle of the disk, and in the very center lies, a very large, flattened bulge, about 20,000 light years across. Around all this is a spherical halo of globular star clusters which stretch out at far as 130,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. There are four spiral arms that wind out from the bulge. They are marked out by bright bluish young stars and pinkish clouds of glowing hydrogen gas. When you close in on the bulge, the stars there are mainly red and orange. These are old stars which have been packed thousands of times closer than the stats of the Suns part of the galaxy. In the very heart of the bulge is the nucleus of the galaxy, which is probably a massive black hole. It's surrounded by a clumpy ring of gas clouds, and a disk of dust. The whole galaxy is turn, but not like a rigid disk. Each star and gas clouds is in it's own orbit. The way our galaxy rotate, tells us that it is surrounded by a huge invisible corona. It contain almost ten times more material than we can actually see, in the form of stars, gas, and dust. The galaxy could even be five times as big as it actually appears, but for now that can stay a mystery.

Lives of the Stars Stars form in cold, dark clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space. Some disturbance rippling through the gas cause clumps or cores to form. The cores contract as gravity pulls it together, and at the same time the core rotates. Collapse accelerates in the center of the core. Energy produced by the collapse heats the center of the core and a protostar forms, surrounded by a zone of clear gas, and a large cloud of cold dust and gas. The temperature at the center gets hot enough for nuclear reactions to start. The star begins to shrink down and spin faster. The surrounded ball of gas flattens into a disk and gas streams out of the stars poles. The wind from the star clears away its surrounding cocoon and it finally settles down to a period without much change. It turns hydrogen gas into helium to supply it with huge amounts of nuclear energy. Everything about a star, its size, color, what happens to it over its life, is fixed by its mass. The most massive stars are about 40,000 degrees, they are 40 times more massive than the Sun, 20 times bigger than the Sun, and they shine about 100,000 times more brightly than the Sun. We can follow through the life and stages of a star similar to the Sun. About nearly 5 billions years ago, the Sun had formed from an interstellar cloud and had settled into a long period as a stable yellow star. In another 5 billions years. It will start to run out of hydrogen as nuclear fuel for its central core. A series of dramatic changes then takes place. The brightness does not change but the stars outer layers expand, bringing it to twice its size, darkening to an orange color. It continues to expand and in the following billion years it begins blowing off significant amount of material. It shrinks again, then expands again. Its structure inside is instable so for many months it pulsates. Outer layers continue to blow off until the Sun has lost nearly have its original mass. The last layer, around the inner most core, is flung of as a glowing shell to create a planetary nebula. This exposes the core which has shrunk to the size of Earth. The core is now a white dwarf star, and it just cools down and fades over a very long period of time. Not all stars do this. Many do expand and shrink numerous times, blowing off material along the way, but in some bigger stars, at the core is a clump of iron. When the core of iron is about 1,000 km across, the will core lapse until it is less than 50 km. Part of the imploding core rebounds in a shock wave that blows that blows the star apart and produces a spectacular supernova explosion.

The Sun The Sun is a star no different from any other star except that it is much nearer. Like all stars, the Sun is a ball of hot gas. 76% of its mass is hydrogen, and most of the rest is helium. In the central core the temperature is 15,000,000 degrees. The gas is 20 times denser than iron. Hydrogen nuclei, single protons, crash hard together and build up into nuclei of helium. In one second, 4,000,000 tons of hydrogen disappear to generate the Suns energy. This energy radiates out from the core. The Suns surface bubbles with hot gas pushing its way up, creating a mottle pattern called granulation. Jets of incandescent gas, called spicules, shoot up like flames, thousands of kilometers high. In disturbed regions, Sun spots appear, often in pairs of groups. They look dark because they are almost 1,000 times cooler than their surroundings. Huge prominences, vaster than the whole of the Earth, can erupt from active areas on the Sun. The most intense bursts of energy in active regions are solar flares. They can blast atomic particles as far as the Earth and beyond. The particles add to the as constantly streaming away from the Sun into the Solar System as the solar wind. The Sun has a magnetic field of its own, which is about 5 times stronger than the Earths. The Suns magnetism is what controls the appearance of Sun spots and many other Solar phenomena. Each magnetic field line is tied into the fabric of the Sun, and as the Sun turns, the field gets more and more wound up and distorted. Sooner or later the twisted pattern does break down, and a new regular field takes its place. This whole process takes about 11 years, the length of the Sun spot cycle. As the field keeps getting wound up, the sun spots change where they appear depending on the magnetic field. Also, it will start with a small number of sun spots, then the numbers increase until and once again activity declines. This is when a new field usually appears, and the whole cycle begins again.

<span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">History of the Solar System <span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">The Sun formed when gravity pulled together a cloud of interstellar gas and dust. The rotating ball collapsed to a thin disk with a protosun at the center, about 4.5 billion years ago. Within the disk, solid materials began to collect into larger particles, and the particles accumulated into clumps a few kilometers wide, known as planetesimals. Far from the Sun were icy planetesimals, and in the warmer region closer to the Sun, there were rock and metal planetesimals. They were very closely packed, but over time they collided with one another and some coalesced into larger objects. Four large masses formed in the Outer Solar System. They became the giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. They each grew their own disks and moons condensed. Each had a strong enough gravitational pull to attract and hold onto a thick atmosphere of gas from the surrounding nebula. In the Inner Solar System, too many collision occurred for large planets to form, but eventually, the four terrestrial planets emerged: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. They surfaces were heated by constant bombardment and inside radioactivity also generated heat. Metal in the molten planets sank to the middle, while lighter rock rose to the surface. Then they cooled off and solidified. The probably formed from a catastrophic collision between the newly formed Earth and some other planet about the size of Mars. Most planetesimals were destroyed in collision, ejected to the remote Outer Solar System, or settled into the asteroid belt. A few had been captured as moons. Some of the icy planetesimals become comets. Some rings around the giant planets are probably the result of stray planetesimals and comets being torn apart by gravity when they get too close. Venus, Earth, and Mars acquired their atmospheres at a later stage, perhaps from the gases blown out of volcanos, and the oxygen, essential to animals, was produced by plants breaking down carbon dioxide. Today large rocks crashing down from space are far less common than in the early solar system, but 65 million years ago, a 15 km comet striking the Earth, almost certainly caused the mass extinction of many animals at that time, for example dinosaurs.

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Rocket History

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">The Beginning of Rockets <span style="color: #ff9435; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 130%;">One of the first successful devices to employ the principals essential to rocket flight, was a rocket-like device called an aeolipile. It was created around 100 B.C. by a Greek inventor named Hero of Alexandria. He put a sphere atop a kettle of boiling water. There were two L-shaped tubes coming off the sphere allowing steam from the boiling water to give it a thrust, causing it to rotate. However this was not exactly a rocket. Just when the first true rockets appeared is unclear. There are stories of early rocket devices which appear sporadically through the historical records of various cultures. The Chinese may have found out about rocket on accident before beginning to experiment with them, creating Chinese-fire arrows, or arrows propelled by rockets. The Chinese used rockets against the Mongols during 1232 while they were at war. The Mongols then produced rockets of their own and probably were also responsible for the spread of rockets to Europe. After that, all through the 13th to the 15th century there were many reports of multiple rocket experiments.

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">Rockets Today <span style="color: #ff9435; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 130%;">Back in 1898, a Russian schoolteacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) proposed the idea of space exploration by rocket. He also suggested, in a report he published, that we use liquid propellants for rockets in order to achieve greater range. Tsiolkovsky has been called the father of modern astronautics because of all his ideas, careful research, and great vision. In the early 20th century, an American, Robert H. Goddard begin to conduct many practical experiments in rocketry. He achieved the first successful flight of a liquid-propellant rocket on march 16, 1926. It was fueled by liquid oxygen and gasoline. It flew for only two and a half seconds, climbed 12.5 meters, and landed 56 meters away in a cabbage patch. Goddard's experiments in liquid-propellant rockets continued for many years. His rockets became bigger and flew higher. For his achievements, Goddard has been called the father of modern rocketry. The Germans formed a small rocket society which led to the development of the V-2 rocket which was used in war. After the war ended, many of German rocket scientist went to the United States and others went to the Soviet Union. They both began to realize the potential of the rockets as military weapons and began experimenting. Soon enough, the Soviet union launched Sputnik I, the first successful satellite launched by the Soviets, and soon after, they launched a satellite carrying a dog named Laika. Laika survived for seven days before being put to sleep before the oxygen supply ran out. The US also launched a satellite called Explorer I. In October of 1958 NASA formed with a goal for peaceful exploration of space for the benefit of all humankind. Soon many machine and people were being launched into space, getting us to where we are today.

<span style="color: #00d622; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Rocket Launch Experiment <span style="color: #3be59e; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">The purpose of our experiment was to determine whether the mass of rockets affect their maximum altitude. My original hypothesis was that the heavier the rocket, after a certain weight, the lower it flies. In order to do this we, as a class, created our own rockets. In total we created 8 rockets. Everyone had one partner, and each pair made one rocket. We put the rockets together from a kit and everyone painted theirs differently. When painting, every group used a different amount of paint, which is a very important element which comes into play during our launches. Once we were done creating our rockets, we launched them. When we launched all our rockets, we recorded the angles for each one. The angle was from the ground, 100 meters away from the rocket (which we measured with the trundle wheel), to its maximum altitude. We determined the angle of each rockets flight using angle guns For each rocket we recorded this data. When we got back to the class we used trigonometry, with tangent (tan), to figure out the height of each rocket's maximum altitude (100 * tan(x) - with x being whatever the rocket's angle was). Once we had this data, we took the mass of all the rockets, and the max altitude of all the rockets and made a graph, putting them together in a scatter plot. After looking at the scatter plot, in my opinion, the mass in our case, did not affect how the rocket flew that much. When we were launching we did have some trouble with some of the rockets, which may have caused changes in the data, but overall I don't think the mass affected the flight of the rockets that much. We did have a large range of max altitudes though. <span style="color: #00d620; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">How our Rocket Flew <span style="color: #3ae59d; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">When we launched our rocket, it did not launch at first like many others. We replaced the ignition and tried launching again. Once again it did not immediately launch. After a couple more tries it did launch. We still are not sure why this is, as it also happened with a sizeable amount of the other rockets as well. When the rocket launch it went quite high in the air and also went pretty straight. There was some wind that day, and so when the parachute popped out our rocket was carried off passed the baseball field. Some other groups parachutes did not unfold in the air, but since ours did, no damage was done to the rocket and no fins were lost. The parachute was slightly burnt after the launch but it was still in good enough condition to be reused. Overall, I would say our launch was quite successful, as our rocket was also the one that flew the highest in our class.

<span style="color: #510091; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Mars Rover Drop <span style="color: #af69f4; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Knowing how to get to Mars, and having a rover that will explore Mars is one thing. You have to remember though that you have to land the rover safely on Mars. So how do you do that? We simulated a Mars Rover Drop in class. First we designed our devices. My partner and I's plan was to wrap the "rover", or in this case the jar of apple sauce, in bubble wrap the hand it with piper cleaners in the center of an air-filled plastic bag. Once that part was completed, we planned to attach a parachute made of paper. Once this was completed, we added balloons to the bottom of the structure, thinking it may provide extra cushioning. We built the device exactly how we planned except we added some paper towels to the inside of air-filled bag to provide even more cushioning. When we went to throw our devices and test whether our device worked or not, it turns out that we were throwing it out at an angle that was much more than we anticipated. This meant that the device may not land right-side up, meaning the balloons would have to more purpose other than some possible extra air resistance. This is actually sort of what happened. Our device ended up landing more on its side than right-side up. Next time I would probably consider trying to protect all the sides instead of just the bottom. Also, the distance that the devices were dropped was shorter than we had anticipated and so the parachute didn't come in handy as much as it could have from a greater height. Our device did work though, and our "rover" came out of our device, unharmed, within the time limit. So overall, our Mars Rover Drop was quite successful. <span style="color: #341b99; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%; line-height: 0px; overflow: hidden;">

<span style="font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Robots Before Now <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Robots and Robotics are a fairly new thing, but that doesn't mean they don't have a history. All the way back in 1495, some people, like Leonardo da Vinci, had the idea for robots. Leonardo not only had the idea about robots but he even sketched plans for a humanoid robot. Then between 1700 and 1900 quite a number of life-sized automatons were created. One of those was a, now famous, mechanical duck made by Jacques de Vaucanson which could actually crane its neck, flap its wings, and even swallow food. After that, all the way through the 1900's even to the 2000's, people have been designing and improving upon robots and their uses. They began to create robot toys, robots to help industrialization, robots for practically anything people could imagine them being useful for. This brought us to where we are now with robots. We can find robots in many places now a days and they help us with so many things.

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<span style="font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Robots Today <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Robots today help us with so much stuff. With both essential stuff and experimental stuff or even just for fun. We use robots for things such as industrialization. One example of this are the robots we use in car factories. We use robots in car factories and it has increased production by much more than it used to be. We also use robots for toys. There are many toys that are robots both with the intention of looking like and being a robot or with the intention of mimicking something else. One example of this are the FurReal Friends toys. These toys are robots which have been made to look like, act like, sound look and in general be like certain animals. They have robots that mimick anything from cats and dogs to guinea pigs and parrots. So whether we are using robots to help us advance in everyday life or whether it is just to amuse us and keep us busy, robots play quite a sizeable role in our life's, and there is much more to come from spectacular creations.

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<span style="color: #ff6b3d; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Programming Robots <span style="color: #ff8616; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Robots are quite spectacular and unique creations. Program them to do something, and they can complete the task. In our class, we use Lego Mindstorm robots and the Mindstorm Programming program. We have been learning how to direct our robot through different challenges. Our robots are, basically speaking, small computers attached to different motors, which is what enables the robot to move. There are so many things to can program the robot to do. Some of the most basic things you can program it to do is to move, forward or backward. In order to program your robot, you use the Mindstorm program and you drag different command blocks onto a building guide creating a series, short or long, of commands. Then, you download it onto the robot, run the program from the robot, and watch it perform it. From there you can work you way up through the different programs, making them more complex, enabling the robot to perform more complex tasks. Along with more complex programs, you can add sensors to your robot.

<span style="color: #ff6b3d; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Robot Sensors <span style="color: #ff8616; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">To make the programming more complex and challenging or even to help your robot you can add sensors to your robot. We used four different sensors: sound, ultrasonic, light, and touch. Wit the sound sensor you could program your robot to act a certain way when it heard a sound. You could make it even more specific and have it act differently depending on how loud or quiet the sound was. With the ultrasonic sensor, it was like giving our robots eyes. The sensor sends out waves which bounce of objects in front of it, determining how far away they are from the robot. Using this, you could program your robots to stop a certain distance from an object. The light sensors allowed to robot to recognize light and dark surfaces and light in general as the name suggests. You could tell it to follow a line between a lighter and darker surface or to stop on a lighter or darker surface. Lastly, the tough sensor, as its name suggests allows the robot to act in a certain way when the tough sensor has been pressed, released, or bumped, depending on which you choose. This could allow you robot to move around then when something pressed the touch sensor, for example if it ran into a wall, it would stop. This sensors can be useful for so many different things and can help you robot function better with more accuracy. <span style="color: #ff8616; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;"> These are the sensor that we worked with. (From left to right: Ultrasonic, Tough, Sound, and Light sensor)