Ryan+K+SFLOM

Electricity Electricity is caused by positive or negative charges. Electricity powers many things from blow dryers to phones. There are three different kinds of electricity. One type of electricity is discharge. Discharge is when the electricity is not organized and out of control which can lead to something blowing in up in some cases. The second type of electricity is current. Current is when the electricity is organized and can power and object without blowing it up. An example of current is when you phone is charging. The third and final type of electricity is static electricity. Static electricity involves the lack of movement of electrons on an insulator. An example of this is when you hair sticks to a balloon when you rub it. Electricity is when positive and negative charges moving an object unless it is a super insulator.

Electricity is a vital component of successfully going to mars. Some things that need electricity to work that are vital to our mission to going to mars are lights for inside the rocket, the control panel, when you talk to people still in earth, heating and cooling. Without lights on the rocket we would not be able to see anything and therefore making getting to mars a lot more difficult and almost impossible. Without being able to talk to people on earth we would lose our position and not be able to get to mars. Another super vital thing is heating and cooling because if we do not have that we will die from being too hot or too cold. When we get to mars a rover needs to be place and that requires electricity also. There are many other components that use electricity that we need but the point is proven. Electricity is vital for us to get to mars and surviving.

Magnetism, and How it Could be used to Find Life on Mars Magnetism is the attraction and repulsion between two objects. All atoms are magnetic a little but the three atoms that are noticeably magnetic are iron, cobalt, and nickel (The Iron Triad). There is a south pole and a north pole to every single magnet. The strongest part of the magnet is the exact north and exact south poles. The weakest part of the magnet is in-between the north and south poles. The opposite poles attract and the same poles repel. Two south poles and two north poles would attract each other. One south and one North Pole attract. Another type of magnet is an electromagnet. An electromagnet is when an electric charge creates a magnet. It can be made by a current-carrying wire s wrapped around an iron nail. Each loop is its own magnet. When you have enough loops you can create a super strong magnet. This electromagnet only works when there is an electric current running through the wire. When the wire doesn't have Electricity in it, it is not a magnet. This electromagnet is helpful in car junkyards. When you turn the electricity on it can pick up a car but when the electricity turns off it drops the car because it does not have a magnetic field around it anymore.  How could magnetism be used on mars. One way magnetism could be used on mars is to find maybe some other life. We could use a magnet to detect if there is any life anywhere because we are magnets and to see if there is a creature magnetic like us then that would help us determine if there is any life on mars. We could use our magnets to determine where we are in mars in case we go too far from the ship and need to know where the rocket is if we cant see it. We could also measure the magnetism of mars to measure if its magnetism is strong enough to protect life on mars. We could also measure to see if the magnetism is strong enough to keep the charge particles from the sun that hit our atmosphere and create the aurora to hit down on mars and to determine if there could be life on mars ever and if there was life on mars at one point. Magnetism could be very useful on our trip to mars and searching for life. Videos **__ Big Bang to Galaxies __**

The Universe was created in one small event. This theory is called the big bang theory. In this theory there was an explosion from one atom 15 billion years ago. Matter and antimatter collided to make energy which was then formed into matter. Protons and neutrons were created in the first moments but electrons only began to orbit protons and hydrogen nucleases when the temperature dropped to 3000 Kelvin. Galaxies were created 2 billion years after and ours was created 3 billion years after the big bang. Our galaxy began as just a lot of gas. There are three forms of galaxies, elliptical, spiral and irregular. Galaxies do not collide as much because back then the galaxies were much closer together.


 * __ The Milky Way Galaxy __**

The Milky Way is a disk which is 100 light years across and 1-2 light years thick. In the middle there is and a central bulge 20,000 light years across. It was created 3 billion years after the big bang. Half way out in one of the disks is the sun. 4 spiral arms come out from the bulge which has red and orange stars in it. The sun takes about 250,000,000 years to go around once. The sun might be 10 times bigger than we think.


 * __ Lives of the Stars __**

Stars have a long life. When a blast wave is sent of from another star it causes gas and dust to clump. Nuclear reaction start as the star spins and shrinks and flattens. Stars turn hydrogen and Helium giving its self-energy. The biggest stars are bluish white. These stars are about 20 times bigger than the sun. The smaller stars are red and cooler. At the end of a stars life, its core collapses because of an iron core in a star that blows up the star.


 * __ The Sun __**

The sun is a ball of hot gas which is 5 billion years old. The sun is just helium and hydrogen. The suns outer layer is million degrees and seen as flames. The core is 15 million degrees and the gas inside of the sun is 20 times denser than iron. 4 million tons of iron is given off to create energy. Particles from the sun fly into space and come into the earth atmosphere creating aurora. The magnetic field on earth is 5 times less than on the sun.

History of the Solar System

The solar system was created when gravity puled gas and dust together and made a disk with a bulge in the middle about 5 billion years ago. Solid material, created larger particles call planetesimals which are a few kilometers across. Slowly moving planetesimals collided and created bigger particles while others exploded because they were moving too fast. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars (the terrestrial planets) were constantly hit by other particles. Rings of planets, like Saturn's were formed by broken up planetesimals. Atmospheres of Venus, Earth and Mars were created by volcanos and plants created oxygen from carbon dioxide. 65 million years ago a meteor crashed into earth killing all the dinosaurs and other species.

Rockets The rockets today took thousands of years of experimentation and research. The Aeolipile is one of the first examples of rocketry. It was created by a Greek inventor named hero and used steam to propel the rocket upwards and rotate. There was never an exact first date for the first rockets. One of the first examples is in the first century AD. This example is an invention by the Chinese. This invention was a bamboo tube filled with explosive gun powder that propelled the arrow through the air. The tubes were capped at one end and empty on one end. When the gun powder was lighted it let off smoke and gas that escaped through the not capped end thrusting the rocket through the air. The rocket let the arrows going straight and fast. This was the first example of a rocket. The date of these being used was said to be in 1232 when the Chinese and the Mongols were at war. The Chinese used these arrows which were called the ¨arrows of flying fire¨. It is not known how effective these arrows were but they probably affected the Mongols minds.

After this battle the Mongols created their own rockets and were responsible for bringing rockets to Europe. From the 13th to 15th century rocket experiment were common in Europe a monk named roger bacon from England worked on gunpowder that made the rockets go further. Jean Froissart from France thought that more accurate flights could be achieved through launching rockets through tubes. This was the first idea that led to the modern bazooka. Joanes de Fontana from Italy designed a surface running rocket-powered torpedo that set ships on fire. All uses of rockets at this time were for war or fireworks.



A Russian school teacher name Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposed the idea that rockets could be used for space exploration in 1898. He believed that liquid fuel could make rockets go further. He believed the speed and range of the rocket was based on the escaping gasses. An American named Robert Goddard did many practical rocket experiments in the 20th century. His first successful flight using liquid fuel occurred on May 16, 1926, a huge point in time for the growth of the rockets. It flew two and a half seconds, had an altitude of 12.5 meters and landed 56 meters away. I know this might not seem crazy but it was monumental for people interested in space travel his rockets got bigger and flew higher. Parachutes were employed to return rockets safely. Goddard was the father of modern rocketry. The German's society for space travel group created a V-2 rocket in which they threatened Britain with in WW2. This was a small rocket by comparison to today’s rockets. It burned liquid oxygen and alcohol to fuel itself. The rocket could destroy whole city blocks but was never used. The United States and Soviet Union both became interested in rockets being weapons and started doing many experiments. Satellites were the first things launched into space. Sputnik the first satellite that orbited the earth launched by the soviets in 1957 mesmerized the world. A few months later the US military launched explorer 1 which was the first satellite of its own. After this NASA was finally created to explore space peacefully. Later astronauts landed on the moon and robot space crafts traveled to planets. This suddenly opened up possibilities for space travel and exploration. Satellites let us predict weather, investigate our world and use our cellphones. If the rocket was never created the world would never be the same like think of all the teenage girls not being able to contacts their best friends every second.

Rocket Experiment After we created our rocket and they were the exact same mass we painted them. There were eight rockets created by our class, each pair of two people had 1 rocket. Each rocket was painted differently which would make the rockets all weigh differently. After this we weighed the rockets to see how much they weighed before we launched them. Then we had to launched them too see how high each of the rockets could go. I thought that the lightest rocket would go the farthest. When we launched the rocket we had to find out how high it would go. Before we launched the rockets we placed two people exactly 100 M away from the rocket launch using a using a trundle wheel to measure 100M. We have them with an angel gun which is an instrument that would show how high the rocket went up in degrees. Once those two people were ready we placed cord on the engine of the rocket. After this we then had to press two bottoms on a remote connected to these cords to launch the rocket. The two people would record the degree of the max altitude of the rocket. Once we knew the degree of the max altitude we had to find out how high the rocket went in m. the math we had to do to find this height was the tangent of the degree times 100. Once this math is done you find how high your rocket went up and rounded it to the nearest tenth. The rocket weight I do not think had a huge impact on the flight. The rockets that were in-between 44-45 grams went from 101.8 M to 60 M high. This is a very large range. The rockets that were in-between 45.5-46.1 grams went from 83 to 70 feet. There was one rocket that was 48.5 grams and it went 83.9 M. I think that the weight did not affect the flight because all the statistics were scattered and the information was about all the same and there was no clear pattern. I think the only reason why the rockets might have change is if there was a sudden wind or such. I think my hypothesis was right and wrong because the 3rd lightest rocket went the highest but the 4th lightest went the lowest so I do not think the lighter the rocket was the highest it we nt. Our rocket was a very unique rocket. Our rocket did not fly as high as other but went farther away. Our rocket went all the way on to the tennis court. Our parachute worked and the wind blew it and that is why I think it went so far. I think that our fins were a little off. I feel like this might have also made the rocket go further away because the fins weren't as effective, making the rocket not go in a very linear path. I do not think we were as exact as other groups when we put together our rocket so that is another reason why I think it went so far away unlike other group's rockets. Rover Drop Our design had many different parts. In our design there were balloons, parachutes, a blown up plastic bag, bubble wrap and our cup. We used all these so that we could slow the time of the impact. We want to slow the time of impact because the slower the impact the less force will be applies to the rover. We made a parachute made out of tape, paper towel, and paper. Our parachutes job was too catch the most amount of air so that it is not very aerodynamic. We used two balloons to make the density of the devise a lot less dense which will slow down the time of the time of impact. We put the rover in a cup in bubble wrap in a blown up plastic bag to soften the impact and to add cushion to the rover. Our parachute and balloons were connected to the plastic bag by tape. Our tape failed us and let go of the balloon and parachute and so all we had was our blown up plastic bag and bubble wrap and cup. All those components softened the impact and slowed down the time and our rover survived. Next time I would use better and stickier tape or even glue so that the balloons and parachute stayed connected. .

Robots HISTORY OF ROBOTS A Greek engineer named Ctesibus was the first one to think of the idea of a in 270BC .The first sign of an artificial human being was when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The word "robot" was first used in a play called Rossum's Universal Robots. This play was about man creating robot than robot killing all humans. This play was created in 1921. Norbert Wiener was the first to think that man made objects could be intelligent. The very first robot company was founded in 1956 by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger. A computer controlled robotic arm was first manufactured in 1963 to help the handicapped. The first mobile artificial thinking robot was created in 1970. On June 10th, 2003, the very first Mars rover was launched. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 36px;">MODERN USES FOR ROBOTS <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">Robots are used for many different reasons and are an essential part to our ever day life. Robots are used from exploring mars, entertaining kids and putting parts on conveyer belts. Robots have been used to obtain more information about the world and universe around us. The rovers on Mars are still gaining more information for the NASA scientists. Robots have also helped the handicapped and impaired. Robots have been used to feel like real hand and legs more than ever. The robot called iRobot has made an impact for all of us that we can relate to. The IRobot now goes across your floor and cleans your floor so you don’t have to vacuum. Industrial robots also help businesses. Workers will get tired of putting on the same part on a car conveyor belt so robots can now do that, and employers don't have to pay the robots so it’s a plus for the businesses. robots can also now entertain kids. The "Zoomer Interactive Dog - Dalmatian" acts like a real dog but doesn't poop or smell or get tired. It is meant for children so it never gets tired and its not as much responsibility. Robots are an essential part of our daily life.

<span style="display: block; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 60px; text-align: center;">Mindstorm Programming Robots are a unique instrument. If you give them a set of commands they will do exactly what those say. We used Lego Mindstorms robots and the Mindstorm program to program our robots to do a set of challenges and tasks. At first we began with the simple stuff. We moved the wheel just one rotation. As simple as it sounds it is harder than you think. You have to place the exact block with the exact commands through a set of settings to get it to move just one rotation. You choose different rotations, speeds and turns. After using just the moving tool we also included some sensors. Some sensors that we included were light, sound and touch. Once we finished our set of programs we downloaded it onto the main computer (the brain of the robot) using a special wire. The set of commands was named and with a press of an orange button the robot would use its brain and do the set of actions that we commanded it to do. We then worked our way through moving and stopping, point turns, curve turns and driving in a square. After a lot of fundamentals we had our first challenge which included a lot of turns

We attached many different sensors to our robot including sound, light and touch and ultrasonic. The robot could pick up loud noises with the sound sensor and once it heard that sound it would perform the set of actions attached the sound like move three rotation then stop. The ultrasonic was a little bit harder. The ultrasonic sensor sent out really high pitched sounds not audible to the human ear. Once the waves hit something the bounced back to the robot so that the robot knew something was there and how far away it was. We would tell it to move or stop or do some action after it got so close to an object. The next sensor was a light sensor, which rated every shaded of color from 0-100%; Black being 0% and pure white being 100%. This could be used if you wanted the robot to follow a black line, or if you wanted the robot to stop when it reached a certain shade of color. The last sensor was the touch sensor. This sensor was one of the easiest concepts to understand. Once the sensor felt hat it hit something it would perform the set of commands which followed.