Margaret+M

=The Search For Life On Mars! = //By Margaret M//

//From the Big Bang to Galaxies//
The universe has gone from not existing to expanding rapidly to experiencing many, many changes. According to the big bang theory, in the beginning the universe was extremely tiny, and then exploded out of nothing at an extremely high temperature. Many, many particles were created: these are the building blocks of our atoms and electrons. There were quarks and antiquarks, and radiation flowing rapidly from one place to another. When a quark and an antiquark "touched", they annihilated eachother, and created huge amounts of energy. The universe then cooled and expanded at a steady rate, and protons and neutrons began forming once the heat wouldn't rip them apart. After about a second, electrons and other smaller particles became prominent, but then are mostly annihilated. The first nuclei begin forming, mostly the lightest of our elements: mostly hydrogen and helium. After a while (about 300,000) the temperature has dropped enough so that electrons can start orbiting the nuclei.

About a few billion years after the big bang, the first galaxies begin appearing. When there is more matter in one place than another, gravity pulls that matter together and these clumps of matter get more and more dense, separated by empty voids of nothingness. Our galaxy began as a ball of gas, which then became a spiral. The spiral galaxy is one of the three types: elliptical, spiral, and irregular.

Some galaxies are centered around a central bar rather than a sphere. They can be tightly wound or loosely wound, and in the early universe, two galaxies colliding to merge together was common.

//The Milky Way Galaxy//
The milky way galaxy is a view of our galaxy that we can see, made up of thousands of stars. If you were to see if from half a million light years away, then you would see a disk of light with a bulge in the middle. The bulge is the nucleus of the galaxy, probably a black hole. Looking at the galaxy from above, four spiral arms come out of the bulge. The arms are not permanent- they are just temporary places where matter piles up, or at least in the terms of the universe. Our sun is on one of these arms, many light years away from the center. The stars in the arms are mainly blue young stars and clouds of hydrogen gas, but the bulge is made up of yellow and red stars. The whole galaxy is turning, but each star by itself rather than all at once- not like a rigid disk. There is more matter out there than we see, and dark matter as well. No one has ever been outside the milky way, and so we don't know what dark matter is- but it is out there.

//History of the Solar System//
When the sun was created by gravity pulling together dust and gas, rocks called planetesimals formed in its outer reaches. These planetesimals crashed together and collided and sometimes fused together to create larger planetesimals, and as the sun's large atmosphere dwindled to a smaller atmosphere (still huge in earth standards), they were left in space. In the outer solar system, four huge masses formed: Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune, and Saturn. They developed atmospheres of their own using gravity, and planetesimals that were attracted became bigger and bigger until they are considered moons. It was impossible for large planets to form closer to the sun due to the collisions happening there, but eventually four smaller planets emerged: Venus, Mercury, Earth, and Mars. Their atmospheres appeared later, probably due to gases spewing from volcanos on the earth's surface. The moon was probably formed because of a collision with earth and another planet, about the size of Mars. Eventually, most of the planetesimals were destroyed in collisions. The remainders of these planetesimals were either ejected towards the far reaches of the solar system, or they stayed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. A few became the moons of planets, and icy planetesimals become comets when they get close enough to the sun.

Rocket History
Rockets have been around since the ancient Greeks' time, whensome of the principles used in rocketry were  discovered, and became much mo re complicated as time went on. In Alexandria at about 100 BC, an inventor called Hero used steam to move a sphere, which rotated until all the water in the kettle below it had become steam. The first rockets as we think of them were probably created by the Chinese, who put an early form of gunpowder in bamboo tubes. They attached these bamboo tubes to arrows and somewhere along the line discovered that the rockets could move by themselves, using the power of the exploding gas. During one battle against the Mongols, the Chinese used these rockets to fight them off, and the Mongols created their own rockets. The Mongols then spread rockets to Europe, where many Europeans experimented. Some improved gunpowder used in rockets, others designed rockets for other uses.

In 1898, a Russian schoolteacher proposed the idea of using rockets to travel to space. He suggested the idea of using liquid propellants to do so, which were built upon by an American scientist, Robert H. Goddard. He conducted practical experiments in rocketry, and tried to find the best way to propel a rocket into space. Despite the difficulties of using liquid fuel instead of solid fuel, Goddard's first flight happened in 1926, and flew for only two and a half seconds before landing in a cabbage patch. It was the forerunner of many other rocket flights.

In <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> the 1900s, communities of people dedicated to rockets sprang up all over the world. One of them created the V-2 rocket, which was used in WW2. After the war, many V-2 rockets were captured by the Allies, and German scientists went to the Soviet Union or the United States. Both governments discovered the military potential of rocketry, and launched programs to experiment with rockets. These military rockets were later used to launch astronauts into space. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to be launched into space. The United States followed Sputnik I with Explorer I in 1958, and the US organized it's space program intoNational Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which became a civilian agency to peacefully explore space. Many peop <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">le and things were launched into space, and som <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;">e landed on the moon or picked up data about other planets.

Rocket Stages Animation
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Getting a Rover To Mars
There are 5 stages of getting a rover to Mars: Development; Launch; Cruising; Approach, Entry, Descent and Landing; and Impact to Egress. In the Development stage, a team puts together the rover and test it extensively. They attach test instruments and make sure that the rover can handle the rough atmosphere coming into Mars, using a heat-shield that will detach from the Rover along with the rocket that it uses to get to Mars. They also build the rover to handle bitterly cold temperatures on Mars, and make sure that everything is working. They then transport the rover to where it will be launched, where the Launch team takes over. They add the rover to a rocket that will travel more than 60 million kilometers to the Red Planet, and finally, on Launch Day when everything has been configured and Mars is at the right angle so that the rocket can swing around to land on it with the least amount of time possible, they launch the rocket. Cruising is the stage where the rocket, with the rover attached, travels to Mars. With Curiosity, the Cruising Team will have the opportunity to give the rocket a tiny amount of push that will keep Curiosity on the path to Mars. This is the stage that Curiosity is currently in. The Landing Team actually lands the rover- Curiosity will use retro-rockets and a huge parachute to land. It was built so that it would be able to stand the shock of landing on Mars, unlike other rovers, which have had airbags that inflate on Mars. Impact to Egress is getting the Rover out of what it traveled to Mars in, and ready to explore Mars. They make sure that everything is working actually on Mars, and they establish solar power to power the rover while it gathers information about Mars.



//Parts of a Rocket Labeled//


<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;">Nosecone: guides airflow around the rocket, streamlines <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;">Body Tube: Main structural part (air-frame), usually a strong paper tube <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;">Recovery System: device for getting the rocket back safely and intact for repeat use <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;">Recovery Wadding: protects recovery System from the motor's gasses <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;">Launch Lug: guides the rocket straight off the launch pad <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;">Fins: keeps the rocket travelling straight <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 11pt;">Motor Mount: holds rocket motor in plaMotor: An explosive that gives the rocket push to get into the air, safe and non-reusable

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">The Rocket Experiment:

In class, we built rockets from a kit, and at first, all of them were the same. We painted over them later, and different groups used different amounts of paint, causing the mass of the rocket to vary. We measured these masses with the intent of finding whether more mass meant less altitude, or if less mass meant more altitude. The rockets around a certain mass flew higher than those that were lighter or heavier, but there was one significant outlier- our rocket, which was the heaviest but also flew the highest according to trigonometry. Everyone used the same motor, an A8-3, but some of them didn't function as well as they should have, and because of that they didn't fly. Others' parachutes didn't come out as they should have, or burnt up in air, but most of the rockets were successes.

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Our rocket was the heaviest of them all at 48.3 grams, and at first it seemed like it would fly much, much lower than everyone else's. We used a ton of glue and paint, which was probably why the fins didn't fall off like a lot of other people's did. It actually flew 78.1 meters in the air, climbing higher and higher until it was just a speck, when the recovery system was supposed to come out. It did come out, but the parachute didn't unfold: thankfully, it didn't turn into a dart, but it definitely could have come down slower. It floated and ended up not far from the launch site, but not directly over it, either. I personally think that our rocket didn't fly 78 metres in the air and that the trigonometry was a fluke, because I saw other rockets that I thought went higher than ours, but it is possible that it did fly that high.

The affect of adding more fins (or less) to a rocket's altitude:

The purpose of this experiment was to find out how changing the placement, size or number of fins changes how well or how high a rocket flies. We were allowed to do whatever we wanted with the fins, and some groups simply made the fins smaller, but others were more creative. Some went completely crazy and glued fins onto other fins in ways that made no sense aerodynamically, but certainly looked cool, and others still simply added more fins to the bottom of the rocket or to the body tube. When you look at the graphs made after flight, it looks like there is no relationship between mass and maximum altitude, but you can argue that there is an inverse relationship, with the least mass gaining the most altitude (if you delete three or four data points). The number of fins didn't affect how high the rockets flew, though, and that graph is all over the place, as were the rocket flights. You can make the conclusion from that the mass of the rocket and the number of fins matters less than the placement of fins. The rocket that flew the highest had three very small fins, in the same places where the fins were before, and it flew 72. 7 meters high. Most people seemed to have about six fins, and some of those flew really well, but others didn't, proving that it really depends more on the placement of the fins and the size of them than the number of them.

Our rocket didn't start at first, due to the key not being pushed completely in, but eventually it did, and flew about 21 feet in the air…. Then crashed on the hill. It spun and it was completely not stable. If we were to do this experiment again, I would not put the fins where we put them this time- I would probably just reduce the size of them and place them where they were before, like the group who's rocket flew extremely high.

Robot History:

Robots (or at least the idea of them) have been around since Leonardo DaVinci's time. The word "robot" itself comes from the Czech word "robota" which means "compulsory labor", and was first found in a play by Karel, a Czech writer. Robots are the basis for many science fiction books and films, and engineers all over the world work on building and maintaining them. They are used in factories and at home, and some are simple enough that all they do is move around on a table, but others complete complex factory work: some cars are built entirely by robots! There are different departments of robotics as well: everything from underwater robotics using lasers (read: my dad has been ranting about these because he advises a club that builds them) to humanoid robots that can climb ladders or walk.

The very first robots were created in ancient times, and the concept of robots have been around even earlier. In 320, Aristotle, a famous Greek philosopher, said "If every tool, when ordered, could do the work that befits it… then there would be no need of either of apprentices for the masters or slaves for the lords." and in 1495 Leonardo DaVinci created plans for a humanoid robot. From then on people have been creating more and more robots, which could do more and more as time went on. There have been robots that can play soccer better than the world's top teams, and there are tournaments for robotics clubs to compete in involving specific types of robots built for specific challenges.





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Robot Motors:
Motors can be programmed to move a robot using NXT programming or Mindstorms programming. NXT programming is a very simple five-step program that is usually used to test motors or sensors, and it is possible to program a robot using the NXT system without the use of another computer. Mindstorms programming is used for more complex programs, and does much more than NXT programming. The Mindstorms NXT robots can perform 5 different movements: forward, backward, backward right, forward right, backward left, and forward left. To go forward, both a robot's motors must be going forward at the same speed, and to go backward, the motors have to go the other way at the same speed. To curve turn, one of the motors has to go slower than the other, and as a result the robot keeps moving, but in a different direction. To do a point turn, both motors stop and then go in opposite directions. The more difference between the two motor's speeds or directions, the tighter a turn a robot does.

Geology on Earth and Mars:
O n Earth, geologists use their senses and knowledge to identify minerals and rocks. They use their sense of sight to identify color and luster, which are two visual clues, and they use their senses of smell and taste to see if a mineral that the human nose can detect is present. Another extremely important sense in determining the identity of a rock or mineral is touch- if a rock has a rough surface, for example, then it must not have clean cleavage planes to break on, and thus is a different type of rock or mineral than a rock or mineral of the same with a smooth surface. Other properties are also useful in determining what a rock or mineral is- magnetism, for example, is only found in minerals containing a large amount of iron, such as magnetite or hematite. There are only a few naturally occurring minerals that are magnetic, so the number of things a rock or mineral could be is significantly reduced. Another property is hardness- two minerals that look similar might have completely different hardnesses, for example. Geologists use many other tests as well: there are streak tests for mineral color, as well as fizz tests to determine the chemical compounds that make up a rock or mineral.

On Mars, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) or Curiosity will use a lot of the same tests that geologists on earth use, but will do them mechanically, without the input of humans. It carries a whole laboratory around with it, instead of just a few key items as geologists on earth do, and is able to move large distances without stopping for food or water, and will be able to get to the rockier, more difficult terrain that robots on Mars before haven't been able to get to. It has a laser about a centimeter in diameter that will be able to drill holes in rocks and then take some of the matter into it's lab, where it will analyze the properties of it - whether it is a carbonate compound, if it is magnetic, and if it matches any minerals or rocks found on earth.

= Life =

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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">To have life, something must have a certain set of characteristics: it must react to stimuli, be able to reproduce, need materials, maintain homeostasis, grow, adapt, and respire. Any living thing reacts to stimuli- plants grow towards sunlight, humans move towards food when they need it, fish swim away from sharks when they appear in the water. The thing about the characteristics of life is that they only need to happen once in life for something to be alive, which leads into the ability to reproduce: even if something never reproduces, if it has the ability to reproduce, then it is alive. Another thing that all living things do is maintain homeostasis, or =====

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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">the same conditions in the body. All living things tryto maintain a certain blood sugar (by getting food), internal temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate, and if they don't, they die. The way that living things get better at maintaining homeostasis and getting the materials they need is by adapting: living things adapt so that it is easier for them to survive, as the genes that living things need are passed down through the things that survive. This is why humans are the way that they are: our bodies are adapted so that it is easier for us to get the materials we need. All living things need materials, even if they are not what we think of as "materials", and all living things use those materials to grow bigger, through respiration (which does not mean the intake of oxygen: it means metabolizing food to keep blood sugar homeostatic). =====

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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">On other planets, robots transported to the surface of the planets by rockets perform experiments to see if the soil on the earth contains microbes that have the characteristics of life. This has happened only once, with the Mars Rovers Viking 1 and Viking 2 that landed on the surface of Mars in 1976 and stopped responding in 1980 and 1982, respectively. One of the things that the Viking Landers did was test for life using tests. One way that they did this was by mixing a sample of nutrient-rich liquid water with a sample of Martian soil to see if microbes inside the soil respired the nutrients and emitted methane, which most living things emit as a waste product. Those tests came out inconclusive, though, because the controls did not react like the experiments did: mixing a sample of nutrient-rich water with Martian soil created a lot more radiation than Mars naturally has, without the presence of the water, but the control tests did not have the same reaction. On the Viking 1 and 2s, samples of Martian soil were also heated up to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit to see if microbes existed that could withstand that sort of temperature. =====