Make Your Own Craters
✨ A dropped marble leaves a round crater with bright rays spraying out, exactly like the photographs of the Moon.
🧰 You need
- a deep tray of flour
- a sieve and a spoon of cocoa or turmeric
- marbles and small stones
- a ruler
- newspaper to spread underneath
⚠️ Work on newspaper and drop from no higher than your shoulder so nothing bounces into a face.
👀 What you will see
Each impact makes a round dish with a raised rim. Pale flour thrown out of the hole makes bright streaks across the dark surface, called rays. Dropping from higher up, or using a heavier object, makes a wider crater.
🧪 Do it
- Spread newspaper on the floor and fill the tray with flour at least five centimetres deep.
- Smooth the surface, then sieve a thin dark layer of cocoa over the top.
- Hold a marble thirty centimetres above the tray and drop it straight down.
- Lift the marble out carefully and measure the width of the crater.
- Drop the same marble from one metre onto a fresh patch and measure again.
- Try a heavier stone from the same height and record what you find.
💡 Why it happens
A crater is the bowl-shaped hollow left where a fast object smashes into a surface. The energy of the impact pushes material sideways and upwards, so the hole is round and a rim and rays of thrown-out material surround it, whatever angle the object arrives from. The Moon is covered in craters because it has almost no air or water to wear them away. Earth has been hit just as often, but wind, rain and moving plates have erased nearly all the evidence.
🔁 Now try this
Drop the same marble from 25, 50 and 100 centimetres, measure each crater, and put the widths in a table.
🤔 Think about it
Why does the Moon show thousands of craters when Earth shows only a handful?
🧘 Ask the Acharya
“Why does the Moon show thousands of craters when Earth shows only a handful?” — ask him and he will explain it from your own chapters.
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