There's no "right" set of materials, so be creative and try lots of things to see what works best! Collect your materials. You’ll need a container, some internal padding and external protection to safely land your craft.Use the engineering design cycle for this experiment: design your landing craft, test it to see if it works, change your design to make it better, and re-test to get new results. So, instead of building a disposable egg-drop device and dropping it from increasing heights until it eventually breaks, in this project you built a reusable device that can survive dozens (or even hundreds) of falls from the same height.Design a landing craft that protects your egg passenger when it's dropped from up high. Private companies like SpaceX are also entering the realm of space exploration, with a heavy emphasis on reusable vehicles, to help decrease the cost of space travel. What does all this have to do with space exploration? For decades, NASA has designed vehicles that must protect their precious cargo-human astronauts (and robots!)-when landing on the Moon, Mars, or returning to Earth. If you can slow down the egg's crash landing by cushioning it (or adding a parachute, so it isn't going as fast to begin with), then you will reduce the force felt by the egg, and decrease its odds of breaking. Objects that experience high accelerations or decelerations feel very high forces, which can cause them to break. When the egg hits the ground, it rapidly decelerates (its speed changes). You can also think about this in terms of Newton's second law of motion. The higher you start the egg, the more energy it will have - so you need to absorb more energy to keep it from breaking. When the egg hits the ground, some of that energy is converted to other forms, like sound or heat, and some of it goes into breaking the egg! A protective device that can safely absorb some of this energy can help prevent the egg from breaking. When you drop the egg, the potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, the energy of motion. When you raise an egg off the ground, it gains gravitational potential energy. This process of repeatedly designing, building, and testing, called iteration, is used by real engineers!Īn egg drop project is a great way to learn about several classical physics concepts. Testing and observing your design allows you to identify weak spots that can be fixed in future designs. by using a parachute), and spreading the impact out over a large surface or multiple points (as opposed to a single leg or corner, which concentrates the force all in one place). This means slowing the lander down as much as possible to begin with (e.g. In addition to protecting the egg, a successful re-usable device will need to minimize and distribute impact forces when landing. That approach doesn't work if you want to re-use the device dozens of times! If you only need to drop your device once, you can design it so that some of the materials break, absorbing energy and protecting the egg. Many successful traditional egg drop devices might intentionally rely on this behavior. Taped or glued joints could start to come apart, materials like straws or popsicle sticks might start to bend or snap, and cushioning materials like cotton balls might become compacted, decreasing their effectiveness over time. You might have found this project surprisingly difficult! Even if the egg survives the first few drops, you might start to see wear and tear on your lander. Use soap and water to clean up any raw egg that spilled on surfaces like floors or counters. Throw away any materials that are contaminated with raw egg.
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