Erika+R

=The Search for Life on Mars=

From Big Bang to Galaxies
Our Universe was created about 15,000,000,000 years ago when the Big Bang happened and supposedly, it exploded out of nothing. It was composed of a dense mixture of quarks, antiquarks, and energy. After one second, the temperature had fallen to 10,000,000,000 degrees and was dominated by radiant energy and lighter particles. 2,000,000,000 years after the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies had started and our Universe has a sponge like structure. Our galaxy formed about 3,000,000,000 years after the Universe was formed and started as a huge sphere of gas.

History of the Solar System
The sun formed when gravity pulled together a cloud of stellar gas and dust. In the disk around the sun, solid materials started to collect to create larger and larger particles. These particles accumulated into clumps, known as planetesimals. In the outer solar system, the four large matters that were formed were Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Eventually the four terrestrial planets appeared which were Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

Lives of the Stars
Stars form in cold, dark clouds of gases and dust. The stars turn hydrogen gas into helium, which ends up providing them with a plentiful supply of nuclear energy. The most massive of all of the stars are a bluish color and the surface temperature of the star is around 40,000 degrees. This star can shine 100,000 times more brightly than the sun. Then, the stars that have lower mass are dimmer than the larger stars. In the end, most stars usually follow the same track of life as the sun does.

The Milky Way Galaxy
The light that descends from the Milky Way is from large numbers of individual stars. The stars inside of the bulge of the Milky Way have mostly a red and orange pigment, which shows you that they are older stars. In the center of the bulge lies the nucleus, which we believe is a massive black hole. The Milky Way is surrounded by an invisible corona that contains ten times more material than what we can actually see. In the end, the galaxy may actually be five times larger than what we can see of it.

The Sun
The sun is like any other star but the only difference is that it is closer to the Earth. 76% of the sun’s mass is hydrogen and most of the rest is helium. The sun’s powerhouse is buried in the central core where the temperature is 15,000,000 degrees and the gas inside is 20 times denser than iron. Every second, four million tons of hydrogen disappears from the core to generate the sun’s energy, which radiates outwards from the core. Then the earth’s magnetic field funnels particles from the sun downwards near the North and South poles, which crash into the upper atmosphere causing the particles to glow with the Aurora.

The Hubble Deep Field Academy
In the orientation, the questions that I asked were very specific whereas the astronomer's questions were very general. For instance, one of my question's was "Why are all of the stars so fuzzy when there is one bright and defined star on the left?" and their question's were like "How far away are the objects?". In Level 1, I estimated that there were going to be around 2,988 objects in the entire HDF image and the astronomers estimated that there were around 3,000 objects in the entire HDF image. I think that our estimates were so close because it took me a while to count out how many objects there were. In Level 2, the three objects that were classified and agreed on between the astronomer and I were a blue irregular object, a white oval object, and a red circular object. In Level 3, I learned that the astronomer's must study the light an object emits to be able to estimate the distance. In Level 4, I learned that the color of a galaxy indicates the age and the shape of the galaxy indicates whether it is a spiral, elliptical, or irregular galaxy. I also learned that the astronomer's divide the HDF into sections, count how many galaxies are in that section, and then multiply it by however many sections there were in able to estimate the number of galaxies in the Universe.

(Image Linked) Rocket History Greek inventor, Hero of Alexandria, invented one of the first devices to contain the principles essential to a rocket flight. What he invented was the aeolipile which used steam as a propulsive gas. What he did was mount a sphere on top of a water kettle, set fire below the kettle to turn the water into steam and what happened was that the gas traveled through pipes to the sphere causing it to rotate. The first true rockets are thought to be made by accident. These were made by the Chinese when they would fill bamboo tubes with the simple gun powder and then throw the bamboo tubes into fires at religious festivals. These would either explode or slide around because of the gases that propelled them, which was produced by the burning gun powder. Then they experimented and attached the gun powder filled bamboo tubes to an arrow and these became the Chinese Fire Arrows. This is when we think the true rocket was born. Modern day rocketry keeps on building off of the idea that the Chinese had. We have made rockets and satellites which have shown us things unimaginable to mankind.

Rocket Experiment
The purpose of this experiment was to learn more about rockets and how they are built so we built one. We used a kit with a tube, a nose cone, fins, and some other parts that were put into the rocket. After the rocket was built and painted, we went outside to launch it to see how far it went up. We used a trundle wheel to measure 100 meter and at the 100 meter mark was where we measured the angle. We used to angle guns and pointed them at the rocket until it met its apogee to find the angle from the ground. Then we used trigonometry to calculate our rockets maximum altitude. Our rocket's highest point was 14.9 meters high.

After I pressed the buttons to send the rocket off of the launch pad, it stalled for a few seconds. It flew very fast into the air and its highest point was 14.9 m. We thought that it was going to take a nose dive to the ground but it let out the parachute and flew down to a safe landing. I don't know why our rocket flew so poorly. We constructed it according to the instructions and its mass was on the higher end but not extremely heavy after we painted it. I think that the next time, there is nothing really to do differently, maybe the motor was faulty but other than that, there is nothing that we know affected it that we could change. Ride of the Valkyries

Mars Rover Drop
Our team thought of many different ideas, but in the end we decided to stick to the parachute method. First we took a cup and lined it with bubble wrap. Then we tied two pieces of string to either side of the cup. We took a balloon and tied the string onto the bottom of it. Pipe cleaners were taped to each side of the balloon and then a half cut Ziploc bag was tied to the pipe cleaners. In the end, what we were trying to do was to make sure the egg had the least amount of force hit upon it when it landed. I think that the way we built it was very successful because we made sure that if it ended up hitting the ground hard enough to break it, that there was something to absorb some of the force. I think that our team worked very well together and had a successful way to drop the egg without breaking.



Lego Mindstorms Robot
We worked with Lego Mindstorms robots for the past couple weeks. We learned the motor in the robots control the wheels. Without the wheels, the robot wouldn’t be able to maneuver around. The motor also controls where the robot turned, with the help of the commands, and whether it turned counter clockwise or clockwise. Without the motor for the robot, it wouldn’t have been able to do much.

With the robots, you could attach things to it to detect different things. These things that we attached were the sensors. The sensors that we used could detect sound, objects, light, and touch. They were very useful as they could detect when we wanted them to stop and use different commands.

Identifying Minerals and Roving Mars
Geologists on earth can identify minerals many different ways. They can use a magnifying glass to look at the samples and use their characteristics to determine which mineral it is. Also, you can look at the color and luster of the minerals. Another way they can identify minerals is by finding their hardness in relationship to other materials. You can scratch the mineral to the and which ever one scratches is the harder one. There is also a streak test that can be conducted when you scratch the mineral on a streak plate and see what color the streak comes out to. The color of the streak can tell you a lot about the mineral. If you take magnets and swipe them around the minerals, you can find out which ones are magnetic and you can do a taste test with them or a light refraction test.



Curiosity is about the size of a suburban and can carry lots of equipment. He has a drill in which he can put on the surface of Mars. Powder from Mars than comes out and he can pick it up and send results back to NASA. Another way that he can perform geological experiments is that he can point lasers at rocks so that people can have a look and then can shoot the laser beam and see the light that is reflected back.



The Characteristic of Life and How Life Can Be Detected on Different Planets
Do be considered a living thing, you have to have certain types of characteristics. You have to be made of cells, you have to need materials, you have to be homeostatic, you have to respond to stimuli, and you have to reproduce, grow, adapt, and respire. Cells are fundamental units of living things and have many parts. There are also many types of cells such as animal cells, plant cells, and bacteria cells. To be living, you also need materials such as water, minerals, and air. Living things take what they need from the environment. Another characteristic a living thing has to have to be considered alive is they have to be homeostatic. Homeostatic means internally living things stay about the same despite environmental changes. Living things expend a great deal of energy to maintain homeostasis. A living thing also has to be able to respond to stimuli. To respond to stimuli means that the living thing has to react to anything that causes living things to react. There are two types of responses, a positive and a negative. A positive response is that it moves toward the stimulus and a negative reaction is that in moves away from the stimulus. Living things also have to reproduce so that their kind does not become extinct. Reproduction is the process by which organisms produce offspring of their own kind. There are also a variety of ways of reproduction such as sexual reproduction (two parents) and asexual reproduction (one parent). Growing is another characteristic of how we can detect life. All things throughout some part of life develop from a lower or simpler to a higher or more complex form such as the human being. You have to remember though that not all things grow at the same rate or reach the same size because everything is different. Things have to adapt to which are modifications that make an organism suited to its way of life and also change throughout time. The last characteristic that can help detect life is if you respire. Respiration is when you release energy stored in the chemical bonds of sugars. Life can be detected many different ways on different planets. Some of the ways life can be detected is if there are metabolism or organic molecules detected as they did with the Viking Spacecraft. These molecules in the end though were tested negative. However, there were also several factors that did contribute to the theory that life somehow did exist on Mars. There were basaltic rocks below the surface and the right conditions that were like the conditions on Earth. They analyze all of these samples right from the rover and send back the information. The rover first drills into the rock, then claws into the soil, and then he analyzes the samples.