Introduction. Background

Transcription

1 Introduction Our question was What is the affect of the elevation of an area on the state of the crater found there?. This question is important because it shows us how the weather at each elevation affects the state of the crater, it detects weather patterns, and shows whether elevation has a relationship with craters. It is interesting because the results could show the different amounts of wind patterns at each elevation. Our hypotheses are that in the high elevation there are more preserved craters, in the middle elevations there are mostly destroyed craters, and in the low elevations it has mostly modified craters. Background Does anyone know what weather is like on Mars? Mars has a cold, dry, windy climate. Before beginning our research, we had to make general definitions for each crater type caused by the weather on Mars. There are three types of craters: preserved, modified, and destroyed. A preserved crater is a near perfect crater with well-defined rims and a bowl shaped bottom. Older craters affected by erosion that have broken down rims, flatter bottoms, and show signs of impact in or around a crater is a modified crater. Destroyed craters are flat craters that have little or no rim. Impact craters are caused by impact of meteorites on a planet's surface. Each crater is surrounded by ejecta which is the area surrounding the crater that was cast out at the time of the impact. We hypothesized that the lower elevations would have mostly modified craters, the middle elevations would have mostly destroyed craters, and the modified elevations would have mostly preserved craters. When we were deciding what state each crater was in, we looked at the shadowing. If there was a long shadow inside the crater, the walls of the crater were high, therefore making the crater preserved. The shorter shadows indicated that the crater was modified. When the craters had virtually no shadow, the crater was destroyed.

2 Preserved Modified Destroyed Methods There are a couple different spacecrafts that could have been used for researching Mars, and the spacecraft we used in the Mars Research project was the Mars Odyssey. The camera we used to support our targeting of the image was THEMIS, which stands for Thermal Emission Imaging System. The specific feature that we focused on while researching Mars was craters. We studied certain features such as: their shape, depth, and state so we could find how elevation effects the type of crater. The are three different states of craters: preserved, modified, destroyed. In order to study our craters, we studied specific regions. The geographic regions we studied in the

3 process of collecting our data were the Tharsis Region (7000m-12000m) and Hellas Basin (-8000m-4000), which we located on the MOLA map. The measurements we made included counting the number and type of craters. We used crater counting, a program on JMARS in order to keep track of them and get a clear image of the craters. We also used: Crater counting to view craters and easily count them, MOLA 128 PPD elevation, Zoom 64 to control data collection, and various colors for each state of crater to decipher which craters have been counted and classified, which are all a part of the JMARS software. Also, we used Latitude ( ), Longitude (20E- 130E) boundaries when collecting data om JMARS. This table show how we organized our data that we collected in the Hellas Basin region. This table show how we organized our data that we collected in the Tharsis Region. The boxed areas show the two regions where we collected our data from JMARS. We used these regions because they included all the elevations. The scatter plot is a graph of elevation and the type of craters. Some of the observations that we saw was that there were fewer destroyed craters and lots of preserved craters at the 3000 elevation. In the lowest elevation, there are a lot of preserved craters in Hellas Basin. In the middle elevation, there were more modified. In the higher elevation there were less destroyed and mostly preserved and modified craters in the Tharsis Region.

4 This bar graph is a graph of the number of destroyed craters and the elevations. There were more destroyed craters in the elevations and the elevations of There were fewer destroyed craters in the elevation This bar graph is a graph of the number of modified craters and the elevation. Some of the observations that we saw is that there were more modified craters in the elevations of and There were also more modified craters in the elevation of This bar graph is a graph of the number of preserved craters and the elevation. There were more preserved craters in the elevation of We also observed that there were more preserved craters at the top of the volcanoes. This pie chart is a graph of the total number of craters that we found verses each type of crater in the Hellas Basin region. Some observations that we saw was that there were preserved and modified craters in the Hellas Basin. This pie chart is a graph of the total number of craters that we found versus each type of crater in the Tharsis region. Some observations that we saw was the there were mostly preserved and modified craters. We also saw that there were less destroyed craters in the Tharsis region.

5 Discussion The potential errors in our data can originate from how we measured the craters. We measured the craters on overall amount where we should have measured them in percentages of the different types of craters. The overall amount of craters could be extremely different from elevation to elevation where as the percent of the different types of craters (preserved, modified, destroyed) could be very similar. Misinterpretations could originate from that. For example: the line graph makes it appear as though there are immense differences. However, when we took the overall amount of different types of craters on the two sections of mars and inserted them into a pie chart we found that the percentages were almost exactly alike. All the graphs are comparing the elevation and type of craters. Each graph show the total amount of each type of crater and the location of the different regions. There are more preserved and modified craters than destroyed. Hellas Basin is a rocky area and elevation changes depending on the season. In the Tharsis Region, preserved is more because the wind goes around the base, and doesn't hit the top of the volcanoes. These observation and interpretations can help the study on Mars by measuring the age of craters instead of the type of craters. Some of the observations could've been misread and the facts were wrong. All these patterns show how there are more preserved and modified than destroyed. Another potential error that could have occurred is that we may have classified each crater differently than it actually would be. For example, we may have classified a preserved crater as a modified crater because it may be in between both states of craters. It would sometimes be difficult to classify these craters because, as said earlier, it may be in between both states of craters.

6 This could lead to an misinterpretations because if we collected incorrect data, our graphs and conclusion could have been incorrect. It may also cause a minor change in trendline. We apologize for any incorrect data. The graphs could be applied to our question because you can see the amount of erosion that has taken place on some of the craters therefore making them destroyed or modified craters depending on the elevation, amount of the wind, craters that have hit that particular area, and lava flow. Conclusion Our Question for this project was, what is the effect of an area on the state of a crater? To try and prove this question we agreed on a hypothesis that on higher elevations will have more preserved craters. The lower elevations will have more modified craters, and the lowest elevations will have the most destroyed craters. We proved our hypothesis correct during our experiment. Some conclusions we had about our hypothesis was that the most modified craters were on the top of the hills because the wind streams would brake around the bottom of the mountains causing minimum wind at the top where the craters were. Therefor not many of the craters were being eroded on hills. Another conclusion we made was that the craters in the lower elevations were very destroyed because the wind was the most powerful at the bottom because it was being forced around the hills and causing it to destroy the craters. References We would like to thank Dr. Briony Horgan for helping us with research and answering our questions. Thank you Ms. Whalen and Mrs. Conner for giving us this opportunity to take time and learn about Mars. Thank you to Meg for buying us our pizza and giving us the tour of LROC. We would also like to thank Mrs. Jessica Swann for helping us throughout our entire experiment. Thank you to Jamina Winston for her help. Thank you Dr. Ruff for viewing our presentation. We used the THEMIS website and JMARS for our research. Thank you Mrs. Wiese and Mrs. DeLuca for chaperoning.