Taylor+T

**The Search for Life on Mars**
= From Big Bang to Galaxies = I will be talking about the big bang all the way to the formation of galaxies. Our universe began about 15 Billion years ago. The universe exploded out of nothing which is called the "Big Bang". Particles were created on the inside of the universe then protons and neutrons started forming and then electrons are created and then nucleus are created and then atoms are created. All of this happened in 300,000 years. After about 2 Billion years after the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies start to begin. Our galaxy formed when the universe was 3 billion years old, starting as a gas. Galaxies are either elliptical, spiral, or irregular. Galaxies in the early universe were much closer than now and easily collided and emerged into one larger Galaxy. This might happen with our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy in the future.

= The Milky Way Galaxy = I will be explaining a lot about the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is an insiders view of our galaxy. There is a flat disc that is about a 100,000 light years long and 1-2 light years thick. A thinner layer of gas and dust cuts across the middle of the disc. In the center of the Milky Way there is a large, flattened bulge. It is about 20,000 light years across. It is called the Central bulge. The sun lies in the disc. About halfway out of the galactic center. On the other side of the galactic center a dwarf galaxy is merging with the milky way. Star clusters and a sprinkling of stars are scattered in a spherical halo stretching out about 130,000 light years from the center of the galaxies. When looking down on the galaxy, you can see 4 spiral arms wind out from the bulge. They are marked out by bright bluish young stars and pinkish clouds of glowing hydrogen gas. In the central bulge there is mainly orange and red stars. These are old stars packed in 1,000s of times closer than the stars in the sun part of the galaxy. In the center of the bulge in the central 15 light years lies the nucleus of the galaxy. It is probably a massive black hole surrounded by a ring of gas clouds and a disc of dust. The whole galaxy is turning and each star and gas cloud is in it's own orbit. The way our galaxy turns tells us that it is surrounded by a huge invisible corona containing ten times more material than we can actually see in the form of stars, gas and dust. The galaxy might be 5 times bigger than it appears.

= Lives of the Stars = I will be explaining the lives of the stars. Stars form in cold dark clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space. A blast wave from a star or some other disturbance rippling through the gas causes clumps or cores to form. Each core gradually contracts as gravity pulls it together. At the same time, the core rotates. Near the center the collapse accelerates. The energy of the falling gas heats up the center of the core. A proto star forms, surrounded by a zone clear of gas. But a large cloud of cold dust and gas still shrouds the new star. The temperature in the center gets hot enough for nuclear reactions to star. The star spins faster as it shrinks down, and the surrounding ball of gas flattens into a disc. Gas streams out from the poles. The wind of gas from the star clears away its surrounding cocoon. Finally the new star settles down to a period without much change. Turning hydrogen gas into helium provides it with a huge supply of nuclear energy. Bigger stars form and change much more quickly than small ones. In fact, everything about a star, its size, its color, what happens to it over its life is fixed by its mass. The most massive star is bluish-white. Their surface temperature is around 40,000 degrees. They are 40 times more massive than the sun. They are 40 times more massive than the sun or even heavier and about 20 times bigger. They shine 100,000 times more brightly then the star. Moving down through the stellar mass scale, first comes the white stars of spectral classes of B and A. Then comes the Queen colored F stars and yellowed G stars like the sun. Stars of lower mass are smaller and all together dimmer. Their surface temperatures are lower and this affects the color they appear. Orange K stars have about 3 quarters the sun's mass and size. M stars are the coolest and have the deepest orange-red color. They are typically about 1/5 the sun's mass and size and have a surface temperature of around 3,300 degrees. A core of gas with less than about 8% of the mass of the sun will be to small to ever become a real star. About 5 billion years ago, the sun formed from an interstellar cloud. Then it settled into a long period as a stable yellow star. In another 5 billion years, the sun will start to run out of hydrogen gas as a nuclear fuel. In another billion years it will enlarge and turn a dark orange. In another billion years it will become a 100 times larger than now and 1,000 times brighter. It also stars to blow off material and then shrinks down in size. Then it enlarges once more where it gets larger, brighter and redder than ever. It starts to pulsate over a period of months. The sun will then extend as far as the orbit of the earth. Its outer layers keep blowing off into space until the sun has lost almost half of its mass. The last layer, around the innermost core is flung off as a glowing shell. To create a planetary nebula. It exposes the core of the sun which has shrunk to be the same size as the earth. This core is now a white dwarf star. It then just cools down and fades over a very long period. This is how all other stars end except for the largest stars. The largest stars end in a giant supernova explosion.

= The Sun = I will be going into detail about the sun. The sun is a star and like all stars is a ball of gas. 76% of its gas is hydrogen and most of the rest is helium. Only during an eclipse, the sun's outermost layer, the corona, streams out from over the visible yellow disc of the photosphere. The temperature in the gas of the corona is a millions of degrees. Between the photosphere and the corona, the chromosphere is seen as a layer of red glowing flames. Inside the sun's central core, the temperature is 15 million degrees and the gas is 20 times denser than iron. Hydrogen nuclei crash hard together and build up into nuclei of helium. Every second, 4 million tons of hydrogen vanish to generate the sun's energy. This energy radiates outwards from the core. The sun has its own magnetic field which is about 5 times stronger than the Earth's. The suns magnetism controls the appearance of sun spots and many other solar phenomena. The sun spins about once a month but the rate varies with latitude. Each magnetic field line is tied into the fabric of the sun. As the sun turns, the field gets more and more wound up and distorted. Sun sports form when the field loops out through the surface. In the end the twisted pattern breaks down and a new regular field takes over. This whole process takes about 11 years, the length of the sun sport cycle. At sun spot minimum, there are very few spots and they appear close to the sun's equator. Individual spots last a few weeks at most but the overall number of spots and the places they appear both change as the cycle progresses. New spots come at high latitudes, both north and south. After a few years, the number of spots appearing reaches a peak and they are mostly in bands of about 20 degrees north and south of the equator. Then activity declines until the whole natural cycle recurs once more.

= History of the Solar System = When the sun had formed, gas and dust collapsed into a thin disc with the proto sun in the center. In the disc small material started to combine to create larger and larger particles. When particles were flying too fast, they would crash and demolish each other when they made contact. When particles were moving slowly, they combined to create what is known as planetesimals. In what in now the outer solar system, 4 very large masses formed. These became the giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. They grew discs of their own out of which moons condensed. With about 10 times the Earth's mass, the gravitational pull of each of these giants was great enough to attract and hold on to a thick atmosphere of gas from the surrounding nebula. In the inner solar system there were too many collisions for any large planets to form. But eventually 4 smaller planets emerged, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The moon was probably formed in a catastrophic collision between the newly formed Earth and another planet about the size of Mars. The surface of the moon and all other rocky moons and planets were crated by heavy bombardment for about a million years. Eventually, most planetestimals have been destroyed in collisions, ejected to the remote outer solar system, or have settled into the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. A few were captured as the moons of planets. Venus, Earth, and Mars acquire their atmospheres at a later stage. Perhaps from the gas from the volcanoes. On earth, the oxygen is essential to animals which is produced by plants breaking down carbon-dioxide. Today, large rocks crashing down from space are far less common than the early solar system. But only 65 million years ago, a 15 kilometer object striking the earth almost certainly led to the extinction of many species at that time including the dinosaurs.

__Hubble Deep Field Activity:__
The questions that the astronomers had for Hubble Deep Field were the following: "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?", and "What do these objects teach us about how and when galaxies were formed?". Astronomers had estimates that 3,000 objects appear in the image. Three types of objects classified in the Deep Field image are stars, Elliptical galaxies, and Spiral galaxies. Astronomers cannot use size alone to estimate an object's distance from Earth. An object can be close and still appear small when compared with a much larger, more distant object. To estimate the distance of an object, astronomers also must study the light it emits. A galaxies color indicates the galaxies age. Astronomers used a method called "representative sampling" to obtain their estimate of how many galaxies are in the universe.. The sky is divided into sections of equal size and the number of galaxies in one section are counted. The count from that one section is then multiplied by the total number of sections in the sky.

__**Rocket History**__
One of the first rocket-like inventions that had the essentials to rocket flight was created by Hero of Alexandria, a Greek inventor. It was called an aeolipile and used steam as a propulsive gas. It was created around 100 B.C. Nobosy knows when the first true rocks were invented but many people think it was the Chinese. They made a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal dust which created gunpowder. To make explosions during religious festivals, they filled bamboo tubes with the mixture and threw them into fires. What people thought had happened was that some of those tubes failed to explode and instead skittered out of the fires, propelled by the gases and sparks produced by the burning gunpowder. Then the Chinese started experimenting with the tubes. Soon they attached bamboo tubes to arrows and launched them with bows. Then they later discovered that the gunpowder tubes could launch themselves just by the power produced from the ecaping gas. This is what people think was to the real start to rocketry. The mongols and chinese fought in 1232 which is when it was reported for the first time that true rockets were used. After the war the mongols started producing rockets of their own and they think that they are the cause of the rockets to be spread to Europe.From the 13th to 15th century there were many rocket experiments going on in different countries in Europe.In England, a monk named Roger Bacon worked on improved forms of gunpowder thatgreatly increased the range of rockets. In France, Jean Froissart found that more accurate flights could be achieved by launching rockets through tubes.Froissart's idea was the forerunner of the modern bazooka. In Italy, Joanes de Fontana designed a surface-running rocket-powered torpedo for setting enemy ships on fire. Now on to modern rocketry. In 1898, Russian schoolteacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, proposed his idea of exploring space with rockets.He suggested the use of liquid propellants for rockets in order to get a greater range. Tsiolkovsky stated that the speed and range of a rocket were limited only by the exhaust velocity of escaping gases. Towards the beginning of the 20th century, Robert H. Goddard (an American), conducted practical experiments in rocketry.He became convinced that a rocket could be propelled better by liquid fuel. Heachieved the first successful flight with a liquid- propellant rocket on March16, 1926. Fueled by liquid oxygen and gasoline, the rocket flew for only twoand a half seconds, climbed 12.5 meters, and landed 56 meters away in a cabbage patch. After many more experiements the rockets became bigger and flew higher. In the early 20 th century many smallrocket societies sprang up around the world. In Germany, the formation of one such society, the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel), led to the development of the V-2 rocket, which was used against London during World War II. Both the United States and the Soviet Union realized the potential of rocketry as a military weapon and began a variety of experimental programs. They both thought that one day these rocket weapons could be sent into space with austronauts. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union put Earth-orbiting artificial satellite called Sputnik I out in space. Then in less than a month later, the Soviet Union launched a satellite carrying a dog named Laika on board. Laika survived in space for seven days before being dying when the oxygen supply ran out. Then after a few months after the launch of the Sputnik Explorer I was launched by the U.S. Army on January 31, 1958. In October of that year, the United States formally organized its space program by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). So many things happened after the start of the space race. Here are some of them: - Astronauts orbited Earth and landed on the moon - Robot spacecraft traveled to planets - Satellites were lauched into space and scientist used them to investigate our world, forecast the weather, and to communicate instantaneously around the globe There will also be a lot more to come in the future.

** Rocket Labels **
=__ Rocket Experiment Summary __=

The purpose of this experiment was to figure out if the mass of the rocket effected how high it flew. We all built separate rockets from the same kit so the masses of the rockets were the same until we painted them. Our method was to have different weighing rockets to see if the weight effected it's flight. I hypothesized that the lighter the rocket was, the higher it would fly. The rocket masses ranged from 43.6 grams to 46.9 grams. Mine was 46.0 grams. We found out the how high our rocket flew by using trigonometry. This was the equation: 100 x (tan)24. The 24 was the angle that our rocket was measured at. That is how we got 44.5 for the amount of meters our rocket flew up to. The results of the apogee's in our class ranged from 44.5m to 105.4m. We then put this data into a scatter plot and were able to tell that in general the rocket flew higher if the mass was less. My hypothesis was correct. The scatter plot is located below.

Our rocket flight was successful. The ignition was perfect for our rocket. Our rocket flung into the air at a great pace. The weather did not effect our rocket's flight. There was no wind effecting our rocket. It coasted nicely and went high into the air. When it reached apogee (which was 44.5 meters high) our rocket was ready for ejection. The top of our rocket opened up and our parachute came out nicely and recovery was smooth. The rocket floated down and landed softly on the ground. The only thing that could have made it a better rocket flight was to next time put less paint on it since I think it effected how high our rocket was able to fly.

=__ Mars Rover Drop __= = = My team designed our rover to be very safe. The egg was to be placed into the two cups (in the middle of the picture below) with bubble wrap on both the inside and the outside of the cup for extra protection. We held down the Bubble wrap on the inside down with tape and on the out we did it with a rubber band. We also had popsicle sticks on the side to take some of the impact for when the rover landed. The paper is wrapped around the cup to make sure that the egg does not come out. We put on the side to hopefully add some more resistance so that it will fall slower and to take most of the impact for when the rover hits the ground. When actually dropping the rover the egg never came out while falling and did not break. The drop went exactly as planned and was just how we imagined it to be. Also we were able to get the egg out in the 45 second time limit without breaking the egg which was also another success. Below is an image of our rover. = = =Programming Robots=

Motor Use and Function: Our robot was easy to be controlled just by entering 5 simple commands on the robot itself. You could make your robot do more complex routines by using the NXT 2.1 Programming. You could do up to 99 commands but you could have 99 commands per each command. One you were done with your program you download it into your robot and it will do the actions you programmed it to do. The motor in our robot was able to make our robot move, turn, and more. To go straight the wheels rotated forward and to go backwards the wheels rotated backwards. To turn left the right wheel would be the only one rotating and to turn right only the left wheel would be the only one rotating. To take a left turn curve the right wheel would be rotating faster than the left wheel and to take a right turn curve the left wheel would be rotating faster than the right wheel. That was how the robot functioned. Defining Sensors and Uses: The sensors that we used were the sound sensor, the ultrasonic sensor, the light sensor, and the touch sensor. The sound sensor lets your robot hear. The sound sensor can detect both decibels and adjusted decibels. You use the sound sensor so you can have a sound controlled robot. The ultrasonic sensor gives your robot vision. It enables the robot to see and detect objects. You can use it to make your robot avoid obstacles, sense and measure distance, and to detect movement. The light sensor gives your robot vision. It enables the robot to know the difference between light and dark. It is used to read the light intensity in a room and measure the light intensity of colored surfaces. The touch sensor give your robot a sense of touch. It is used to detect when it is being pressed by something and when it is real eased again. Those are the 4 sensors and their uses.



=__ Geology on Mars __= Minerals can be identified in many ways. They could be identified by appearance (color/luster), by reactions (the acid test), by taste, by touch, by light refraction, by magnetism, by streak, and by hardness. You can identify the mineral/rock with its appearance by looking and observing the rock and what it looks like. You can also identify the mineral/rock by using the acid test. You put some Hydrochloric Acid on the minerals/rocks and if it reacts then you know that it is a carbonate compound. You can also identify the mineral/rock by tasting it. You break down the mineral until it is small enough to taste test. You can also touch the mineral/rock and see how it feels in order to identify it. It could be rough, smooth, bumpy, etc. Another way to identify minerals/rocks is by looking at its light refraction. You hold the mineral/rock over a piece of text and see how the text might have changed. You can identify a mineral/rock by seeing if it has magnetism. You hold a magnet over the mineral/rock and see if it attracts. You can also identify a mineral/rock by using the streak test. You make a mark on a piece of white and black streak plate and see what color streak the mineral/rock made on both of the plates. Lastly, you can identify the mineral/rock by its hardness. You scratch two objects on to each other with knowing the hardness of one of the objects. If the mineral/rock makes a streak that object, then its hardness is greater. That is how you can identify a mineral or rock.



Curiosity is a NASA rover that is currently travelling on Mars. Its job is to preform geology experiments. It does its job by drilling a hole in the substance with a drill. The powder that comes out of it goes into the rover. Then the powder is used for experiments. They figure out if the substance is an organic molecule and they are given information on the mineral. Another way the rover collects data is by using its laser so that people can see the rocks on outcrops. It is really fascinating what robotics can do. This is the basic idea of how Curiosity conducts his experiments.



__ ** Characteristics of Life ** __

All living things must posses 8 characteristics of life. They don’t have to be shown all at once but it has to be shown sometime in its life. It has to be made of cells, it needs materials, it is homeostatic, it responds to stimuli, it is able to reproduce, it can grow, can adapt, and it can respiration. Cells are a fundamental units of living things. Cells have many parts which are called organelles. Sometimes cells are organized. They can be tissues, organs, organ systems, and/or organisms. Every living thing need materials. Some materials that living things need are water, minerals, and air. Living things also take what they need from the environment. Different species may need different materials. Living things also need to be Homeostatic. To be homeostatic, internally living things stay about the same despite environmental changes. Living things expend a great deal of energy to maintain homeostasis. All living things also respond to stimuli. They can either respond positively or negatively. Positively would be to move towards stimulus and negatively would be to move away from stimulus. An example is a sunflower. It grows towards the sun because it is a stimulus so the sunflower is reacting to the sun in a positive manner. Living things must also be able to reproduce. Reproduction is the process by which organisms produce offspring of their own kind. There is sexual reproduction and there is asexual reproduction. Plants and animals reproduce in a variety of ways. Living things must also be able to grow. All things develop from a lower or simpler to a higher or more complex form. Not all things grow at the same rate or reach the same size. Other forms of growth are regeneration (the growth of new body parts to replace lost or damaged ones), cancer (uncontrolled cellular growth), and galls (harmful plant growth). Living things must also be able to adapt. Modifications that make an organism suited to its way of life. An example is evolution. Evolution is the process by which characteristics of species change through time. The last characteristic of living things is respiration. Living things release energy stored in the chemical bonds of sugars. Some living things are consumers, some organisms must take in food to sustain life. There are also producers which create their own food. These are the eight characteristics of life.



Life can be detected on other planets in multiple ways. Some of the ways are to look for water for life, look at volcano for life, look at fossils on mars, and looking for isotopic signatures. Scientist program their robots with different abilities to detect life on mars. Some robots like Curiosity can shoot a laser at a substance and get some of it to take and do multiple tests on it in search of life. Most of the ways to detect life on mars is experimental. It may work or may not, that is why they do multiple tests on one substance just to check it out. In 1976 NASA sent two space probes, Vikings 1 and 2, to Mars to determine whether life exists there. The probes carried three experiments specially designed for the task, one of which was called the Labeled Release (LR) apparatus. The LR experiment worked by scooping up a bit of Martian soil and mixing it with a drop of water that contained nutrients and radioactive carbon atoms. They also performed some other experiments including heating some Mars soil samples to different temperatures and isolating other samples in the dark for months. These conditions that would kill microbes that are photosynthetic or that rely on photosynthetic organisms for survival. There are many ways that life can be detected on mars and more ways are still to be created in the future.