Joe+McD

**The Search for Life on Mars**
= From Big Bang to Galaxies = Our Universe started as a huge ball of gas. It was thought that planets including Earth inflated form the size of an atom to the size of earth. The Universe was dominated by small particles. For the next 300 thousand years after that happened not a lot happened. The earth continued to grow and cool down over those thousands of years.

= The Milky Way Galaxy = The Milky Way Galaxy is a wide spread of stars across our solar system. It is a flay disk of stars said to stretch 100 thousand light years across and about 1 to 2 thousand light years thick. In the very center of the Milky Way there is a large bulge about 20 thousand light years across. If you look at the Milky Way from the top there are 4 spiral arms coming out of the center of the bulge. It takes 250 years to go around the galaxy when Earth is moving around the galaxy at 250 kilometers per second.

= Lives of the Stars = Whenever you look up at night time all you see are stars, an amazing creation, Stars. Stars are formed in cold and dark places. When stars are destroyed they explosions causing clumps of what use to be the stars. After stars form they turn hydrogen gas into helium gas causing a huge amount of nuclear energy. The biggest of the stars glow bluish white, and the smaller stars are orange, red. The bigger stars glow about 100 thousand more times brighter than the sun. When the big stars blow up it make giant explosion.

= The Sun = The bight thing that lights up earth is called the sun. The sun is a big ball of hot gas. It’s made up of 76% hydrogen and the rest of the gas is helium. The magnetic field is massive; it’s about 5 times the Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic field catches some of the sun’s rays which make the auroras. The sun turns about once a month.

= History of the Solar System = The Solar System has been around for generation after generation. In the outer solar system there are 4 large masses which are giant planets. The 4 giant planets are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The moon is the light in the sky at night; there are creators on the moon which were caused by asteroids hitting it. Earth is the place where human kind lives. Earth didn’t really have its atmosphere until what we think was from the gases from volcanoes. It was more likely to have meteors were more common to hit the Earth when the solar system was in its earlier stage. When plants started to grow Earth became a living planet because the plants would break down the carbon dioxide to provide oxygen to the oncoming animals.

= Hubble Deep Field Academy = The questions that the astronomers asked about the Deep Field imagers were; how many objects are there in the HDF? How can the objects be classified and identified? How far away are the objects? What are the objects that don't fit into known classifications? What do these objects teach us about how and when galaxies were formed? In the image that Hubble took it was the astronomers estimated that there were about 50 million stars in the sky but in the image it was somewhere in the hundreds maybe thousands. In the second section of the Deep Field the website mentioned irregular (doesn’t have a particular shape), spiral (has arms coming from the center), and elliptical, (smooth and round). To estimate the distance from the stars they don’t look at how big they are in the sky the astronomers look for the light emitted from the star. Galaxies light changes throughout time at the beginning when it is a young galaxy it emits blue light and when it’s an older galaxy it emits red light. The elliptical galaxies are very old, the spiral galaxies are fairly young, and the irregular it’s hard to tell because it was most likely that it collided with another galaxy and didn’t create a spiral galaxy. In the universe astronomers estimated that there were up to 50 to 100 billion stars.



=History of The Rockets=

Rockets are an amazing inventions created by the Chinese. It took many tries for the Chinese to perfect the idea, or the perfection of the time. They started with filling tubes with gunpowder. They would put the rockets, or what they called fireworks on arrows to scare enemies from the sound that they made after the rocket exploded. This worked because the other people that invaded them haven’t come across the fireworks or the rocket arrows, so they were scared of the noise that they made and the explosion that was caused. The first actual rocket that was used was on 1232 when the Mongols invaded China. The Chinese used the rocket arrows to fend off the Mongols.

The rocket didn’t change much until 20th century. People improved the rocket for fun but then the military got involved and took one of the clubs rockets and improved it even more. Instead of the rocket being a nonlethal the military added a war head to the end of the rocket. They also added guidance and this was the start of the first missile. These missiles were called V-2 rockets. Theses missiles gave the Germans a big advantage when WWI came. Eventually everyone figured out how to make these killing machines that could shoot long distances. The rockets were a good and bad invention because it led to fun for people or the clubs. They were bad when the military got involved with the rockets, the rockets became lethal killing machines.



**Rocket Labels**



=Rocket Experiment=

The rocket was ready to fly as we pressed the two buttons to make it fly it took a about 5 seconds to ignite. Then lift off came it soared fast into the air. As the rocket went it was perfectly straight nothing broke off and it didn't spin at all. The rocket engine cut off and it began to coast. As the rocket got to its highest point, apogee. The rocket began to come back towards the ground when ejection happened. There was a big puff of black smoke as our parachute deployed. Only for one thing, the parachute didn't open. It was slowing down because of the drag of the parachute but it wasn't the smoothest of landings as our Rocket landed sideways on the ground.

We all got a rocket packet and we had to build a working rocket. At the end of the experiment we had to find out how high our rocket went. Once we finished building the rockets and painting them we launched them. To find out how high our rocket went we had to use trigonometry, and to do this we had to be in a triangle. We used a trundle wheel to go 100 m away from the launch site. 100 m away we used angle guns to find out the angel of how high the rocket went. To find how high the rocket went you have to find the tan of the degree times 100 and you should get the altitude. An example of this is the tan 36.5 times 100 and that equals 74 m high. This was how high our rocket went but there were some that went higher and some that went lower. At the end my hypothesis was wrong because I thought that the rockets that weighted more would travel higher but it ended up being the other way around. To improve the rocket I think before the launch we could have opened up the parachute. If we opened the parachute before we could have had a better launch/recovery.

= Mars Rover Drop =

For our mars rover drop vehicle we had the egg in a cup that was surrounded and padded with bubble wrap and other soft materials. Then we have another cup full of bubble wrap and we. We designed our egg drop like this to have maximum padding. To add a slow fall we had blown up balloons and we made a parachute out of a plastic 1 gallon bag. We had the two balloons attached the two bag sides. Our rover landed fairly hard on the target, if we didn’t have the padding the egg would have cracked. The next time that we do this I think that we could make it more stable and have a slower descent. If we had more time we could have added more padding just in case the egg were to break.



=How The Motor Works=

The motor is an important part of the robot. It allows the robot to move and do other important movements. Some of the movements of the Tri-bot are curving to the left or right, turn left or right, and going forward or backward. To do a curve to the left the right motor goes faster than the left motor and vice versa. To turn right or left the right or left motor does not move depending on which way you turn. To go forward or backwards the motors must turn at the same rate.

There are many types of sensors each have a different purpose. There are sound sensors, ultra sonic sensors, light sensors, and touch sensors. The sound sensor detects sound. It will make it move from the programming by the sound. The ultra-sonic sensor send out frequencies and when an object is in the way the frequency is detected and it will turn right or left. The light sensor detects light and the reflectiveness of the ground. The Tri-Bot will follow a line on the ground if you have the light reflectiveness programmed right the Tri-Bot will follow a line.

= **Identifying Minerals** =

There are many ways on how geologists identify minerals. There are a couple that are the most common. The geologists hike out to a remote place with layers of earth like in a dried up river. For mars the geologists have to determine if the conditions were right. If the conditions were right there would we certain minerals and organic molecules. The geologists might use tools like compasses, rock hammers, and hand lenses. They might even to an acid test to see what the rock is composed of. The Mars Rover Curiosity is an incredible rover, right now it is on Mars. One of the most important things is it identifying minerals to see if the conditions were right for living species. To find out the minerals Curiosity has a drill that is about a centimeter in diameter. The rover would drill into the rock and collect the powder. The powder would then be split and go into the 2 instruments that would analyze the powder and it would give information about the mineral if there were any organic molecules in it. If Curiosity cant get to the rock and drill into it, it has a laser to detect the light reflectiveness and determine the mineral or rock.



= Life on Other Planets? =

To have a living thing it needs to be made of cells, need materials, homeostatic, respond to stimuli, reproduce, grow, adapt, and respire. First you need cells. There are different types of cells: animal cells, plant cells, and bacteria cells. Some cells are organized, tissues, organs, organ system, and organisms. Cells are just 1 of the 8 things that a living specimen needs. The second is needed materials. As everyone should know living things need water, minerals, and air to survive. Living things also take what they need from the environment and not more than they need. The third thing that a living thing needs is to be homeostatic. Homeostatic is when internal living things stay about the same despite environmental changes. Living things can expand a great deal of energy to maintain homeostasis. The fourth thing is a living thing has to respond to stimuli. A stimulus is anything that causes living things to react. A response is the reaction to a stimulus. There are 2 types of responses. There is a positive response which moves towards stimulus. And there is a negative reaction which moves away from stimulus. The fifth is that all living things have to reproduce. To do these living things need to produce offspring of their own kind. Plants and animals reproduce in a variety of ways, sexual reproduction and asexual reproduction. The sixth thing is that all living things need to grow. When something is growing it is more complex and mature. Like when we were little kids we were small and we could get hurt easily. Now we are older and we have grown it is harder to get hurt. The seventh thing is that all living things need to adapt. To adapt is when something evolves or makes it easier for them to live in the circumstances that they are in. The last thing that all living things need is to respire. To respire is releasing energy stored in the chemical bonds of food. There are 2 ways to respire the first one is a consumer. Consumers is when organisms must take in food to sustain life and the last one is a producer and they create there own food.

How do you find life on other planets? That Is the question, well scientists have done a new study and shown that light reflection now can help scientists find if on other planets. This new study is called the SLP and it measures the cloud cover, ocean, and vegetation on neighboring planets. This is a very important discovery because astronomers can study different planets in another solar system. The SLP work by light passing the earths atmosphere and it then reflects off of oceans and land, so it passes right through the gas.