Rachel

 ﻿ March 22, 2011 Journal Entry One

**What Is In An Electronic Device and How They Are Used On a Mission to Mars. ** The difference between an analog and digital signal is that the analog signal varies (or changes) smoothly and the digital signal does not. The analog signal (the signal used in TVs) varies smoothly, making the image smooth. However, the digital signal (the signal used in CD players) goes in little stops, or jumps. A digital signal can be represented in numbers, or times. Semiconductors can be good in electronic devices because they only conduct under a certain set of circumstances. For example, a semiconductor could be used in an electronic switch, and would only conduct electricity when turned on. In an electronic device, there are certain components. For instance, one component is a diode. This is a solid object that is built to allow an electronic current to flow in only one direction. Another one is called a transistor. A transistor amplifies the signals that an electronic current has. They usually contain semi-conductors. The last one is called an integrated circuit. This is a small chip containing semi-conductors that are made up of many electronic components (including transistors and diodes.) The reason this is used is because it would be difficult to use millions of different electronic components in a computer when you could use just one chip.

Electronic components and devices like these could be useful on a mission to Mars. For example, electronic communicators and cameras are very useful when you are out in space. The reason communicators are useful because you need to talk to the people at base and tell them how the space ship is doing, or to say "Houston, we have a problem." Digital cameras are also useful for documenting discoveries, special moments, and other stuff that the data base need to figure out the mission. Lastly, navigation systems and auto pilots are useful in space. Without them, the people couldn't navigate to Mars because space, the final frontier, is constantly changing, and difficult to navigate. Not to mention all of the electronic robots that are sent on a mission to Mars.

//Ms. Mc: Good general summary of electronics and ideas for how we would use electronic devices on our mission to Mars. Please start your paragraph with a topic sentence. I like how you used the different colors to emphasize the new terms. 9.5/10 //

April 5, 2011 Journal Entry 2 **An Advanced History of Rocketry**

The first device that somewhat used the principals of rocket flight was (believe it or not) a wooden pigeon that used the action-reaction principal during flight around 400 B.C. A Greek named Hero of Alexandria invented a device that kind of resembled a rocket about 300 years later called an aeolipile (Figure 1.) People really aren't sure when the first real, intentional rockets were made, but some say the first were accidental rockets made by the Chinese. During religious or important ceremonies, the Chinese threw tubes filled with gunpowder into the fire during the first century A.D. People believe that it is possible for some of the tubes to have not exploded and skittered away from the fire, causing the Chinese to experiment with these gun powder filled tubes. They eventually attached them to arrows to be used in war, and it was soon realized that these tubes could fly for a distance just off the power of the gas they made. Behold, the first real rocket. The first recorded use of these rockets was in 1232, when the Chinese used them to fight their enemy, the Mongols. Soon, the Mongols replicated these rockets, and they quickly spread. During the 13th, 14th, and 15th century, Europeans experimented with the Chinese rockets, and made a variety of rocket-like weapons. New people found ways to improve speed, accuracy, and distance. An Italian man named Joanes de Fontana created a torpedo than ran on the surface and set enemy ships on fire. Up until this point in time, the rocket was used for fire works and warfare. Nobody proposed the idea of space travel in them until a Russian schoolteacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky got this idea in 1898. In 1903, he wrote a paper about how rockets could have great speed and accuracy in space if they used liquid propellants. He is now called the Father if Modern Astronautics due to his extensive ideas and research. Figure 1. The aeolipile invented by Hero of Alexandria Robert H. Goddard was an American who did some experimenting on rocketry. He wanted to find out how to make the rocket achieve higher altitudes. While he worked on rockets with solid fuels, he decided that the best way to make the rocket fly higher was to propel it by a liquid fuel. Even though this was much harder than making a solid-propellant rocket, he decided to do it. After he had overcome all the difficulties, he finally created the rocket he wanted. When he launched it on March 16, 1926, it flew for 2.5 seconds, and went only 12.5 meters high. Although unimpressive today, that rocket flight seemed amazing to the people back then. Over the years, Goddard's rocket was improved and enhanced, making it fly higher, faster, and more efficiently. Due to his amazing invention, Goddard earned the title Father of Modern Rocketry. In the early 20'th century, rocket societies began to form around the world in places such as Germany and England. One group, called the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel), invented the V2 rocket which was small, and used fore warfare against England in World War 2. It got great thrust and speed by burning a mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol at a rate of about one ton every seven seconds. This rocket could destroy entire buildings, and entire city blocks. Germans then started to develop a plan to build a rocket that could go across the Atlantic, and land in the US. When Germany was overthrown, allies seized unused V2s and V2 parts. Some of these people went to the USA, and some people went to the Soviet Union. Both countries began to experiment with these rockets because they knew that they could be used as a military weapon. Eventually, medium and long-range missiles were created, and became the starting point of the U.S. space program. The Redstone, Atlas, and Titan were examples of these rockets that would eventually launch astronauts into space. On October 4, 1957, the Russians became the first people to launch a satellite into space. It was named Sputnik I (which means satellite in Russian), and it didn't carry any living thing into space (Figure 2). About a month later, the Russians launched Laika, the dog, into space. She survived for 7 entire days before running out of oxygen. A few months after Sputnik I, the US launched Explorer I, a space satellite. Explorer I was launched on January 31, 1958 by the U.S. Army. In October of that year, the US created National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. NASA is dedicated to the peaceful research of space for the good of mankind. After that, many countries started exploring space on their own. In conclusion, rockets went from gun powder filled tubes to space exploring, man carrying tubes. And as science continues to grow and get more sophisticated, who knows what we will do? Or what we can discover? Figure 2. The Sputnik I invented by the Russians

//Ms. Mc: Excellent summary of the history of rocketry with great details and awesome drawings! Great job with your captions and with referring to your drawings in your text as well! 15/15 //

April 5, 2011 Log Entry 3

Rocket Stage Flight Simulation Scratch

media type="custom" key="8985512" width="119" height="119"

How to Use:

1) Click the red button to stop simlation 2) Hit the space bar to reset simulation 3) Click the green flag to start simulation 4) Make sure the sound is on

Log entry 4 <span style="background-color: #00ffff; color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">April 20, 2011

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">

Figure 1: The completed rocket

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0in;">In a rocket, their are many different parts and components, as shown in figure 1. Each part and component does a different thing to help the rocket launch, fly, and land safely. The nose cone of a rocket helps it gain momentum by "slicing" through the air instead of getting more air resistance. The body tube is the main structural part of the rocket that holds the motor and recovery wadding. The recovery system it the device (such as a parachute) that deploys after the rocket reaches it's apogee in order to get it down safely and let the rocket be reused. The recovery wadding is a fire retardant thing that is placed between the motor and the recovery system so that the motor doesn't burn the recovery system. The launch lug is the tube that guides the rocket off the launch pad. The motor mount holds the rocket motor in place, and the rocket motor is a safe device which gives the rocket the power to launch, but can only be used once. Lastly, the fins are the things that keep the rocket flying straight and balanced. All of these things help the rocket when it flies and lands.

//Ms. Mc: Excellent labels and explanation. Please include a title for your entries (-1/2). Please refrain from using slang (i.e., instead of saying "thing," you could say "part." (-1/2). Good work! 19/20//

Log Entry 5 April 18, 2011

<span style="color: #0004ff; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 13pt; margin: 0in;">Rocket Lab; Introduction and Results

The purpose of this experiment was to find out if the mass of the rocket affected how high it went, and if so, how it was affected. The rocket goes through many different stages during flight. It also has many different forces acting on it. When the rocket was sitting on the launch pad, it has the force of gravity and the force of the launch pad acting on it. But since both of these forces are balanced, the rocket doesn’t move. During liftoff, the force of the thrust of the engine causes the rocket to fly up into the air. When the rocket starts coasting after the engine runs out of gun powder, the only force acting on it was gravity because inertia (which the rocket gained from the thrust of the engine), is not a force. It was hypothesized that if the rocket was made more massive, then it would have needed more force to make it accelerate more. This means that a lighter rocket would go higher than a more massive one. The law that relates to this experiment is Newton’s second law, F=m x a. This means that the greater mass would require more force to make it fly as high as a less massive rocket, and since all rockets got the same amount of force, the lighter rockets would go higher. Basically, the less mass a rocket has during the liftoff phase, the more acceleration it will have, and the higher it will fly. <span style="color: #0004ff; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 0px; margin: 0in; overflow: hidden;">﻿<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"> <span style="color: #0004ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; overflow: hidden;">﻿ Graph 1: The relationship between the mass and apogee of the rockets

After the experiment, the graph showed that there was an inverse relationship between the mass of the rocket and the height of the rocket’s apogee. As shown in graph 1, the best fit line of the graph slants down, which means that the less massive rockets flew higher. The hypothesis was supported because the lightest rocket flew the highest, and the most massive was one of the lowest flyers. As shown in graph 1, the rocket that weighed 42.8 grams flew 135 meters. This was the lightest rocket, and the highest flight. The most massive rocket (weighing 48.7 grams) flew only 84 meters high. But there were some problems with this experiment. For example, there were only seven rockets launched, so the results probably weren’t very accurate. Another thing was the angle gun, because the measurements for the same rocket were often very different. The last problem was the wind. The wind blew some of the rockets into the trees, and probably altered the flight path and changed the apogee. But despite these problems, the experiment would probably not change very much if it were redone without these errors. And therefore, the hypothesis was confirmed, and the rocket with the lighter mass will fly higher.

Log entry #6 April 25, 2011 = Crash Course Questions = = = === Why does the moon revolve arond the earth: There are many theories about why the moon revolves around the earth. But the best theory is that when our galaxy was still forming, a planet the size of Mars collided with earth in a catastrophic collision, as shown in figure 1. This probably formed the moon. Since the earth was bigger than the moon, the moon got sucked into its gravitational pull. This is how the moon came to revolve around the earth. ===

=== Which is older, the universe or our solar system: The universe is also older than the earth. The reason for this is that the universe formed the earth; therefore it would have to be older than it to do so. The universe was there when the big bang theory happened (as shown in figure one), and the big bang was what created the solar system. ===

//Ms. Mc: Good answers and pictures. If you are taking about the age of something, you should include a date. For example, how long ago did the Big Bang occur? How long after that did galaxies start to form? 9/10//

Log Entry #8 May 5, 2011

The Building Blocks for the Robot Challenge
This paragraph will describe the programing blocks for the first robot challenge. It was the driving course one where the robot drove over a piece of tape. It had to be programed to go straight, turn, go straight, turn, go backwards, stop on a certain point, spin twice, and display a J. This process took ten blocks in total. The first block was a motion block. It activated B and C servomotors in the robot. It also told the robot to go straight forward at 75% power for 2.8 seconds. The second black was also a motion block. It told the robot to turn left 200 degrees at about 75% power using servomotors B and C. Block three was also a motion block. It activated B and C servomotors in the robot. It also told the robot to go straight forward at 75% power for 1.5 seconds. The fourth block was a motion black that told the robot to turn right 200 degrees at about 75% power using servomotors B and C. Block five was, you guessed it, another motion block. It told the robot to use servomotors B and C to straight backwards at 75% power for a second. The last motion block was block six. It used servomotors B and C. It made the robot turn left at 50% power for 680 degrees. Block seven was a sound block. It told the robot to play the applause sound file with the volume at 75% after the robot had completed block six. Block eight was a display block. It told the robot to display Smile 01 ( J ) at 20x and 15y on the robot screen after it was done with block seven. Block nine is a wait block that tells the robot to wait, and block ten is a display block telling the robot to reset. Blocks 1-6 can be very useful when programing a robot on Mars. These blocks tell the robot to go where the scientists want it to go. TheThese are the blocks that it took to make the robot complete the task it was supposed to. The sound block can be used on Mars because the robot might need to project soundwaves, or make a sound that gets transmitted to the scientists back on Earth. Display blocks such as 8 and 10 can be used to display pictures to the scientist of the things that the rover photosraphs. For example, it will display a picture of Mars because of the display block. Lastly, a wait blopck can also be helpful on Mars because the rover will wait if goexs up to a crater or something. And one thing I can say is I certainly have more appreciation for the robotic programmers and designers who deal with this 24/7. Figure 1: The programing blocks that made up robot challenge one.