11/9/11 Questions (Reina, Stephanie, Jen)

•What causes the change in daylight hours?

 The tilt of the Earth causes the change.  When the tilt is close to the sun (titled North), then the days are longer, and when farther the days get shorter. 

•When is the earth closest to the Sun? 

 The earth is closest to the Sun in January, so you think it would be warm in January, but it isn't, but the Sun is closest in Jan. 

•Do the seasons and/or tilt depend on distance from the Sun?

 The seasons do not depend on distance from the Sun, as see in when the Sun is closest in January.  If distance played a role, then it would be summer in January, but it isn't.  The seasons are caused by the tilt of the Earth, when one part of the Earth is tilted towards the Sun then that part experiences summer.  When the other part is tilted away from the Sun, they experience winter.  The tilt also does not cause in change in distance from the Sun, because the distance is so great that the tilt isn't significant enough to make a difference.

 

•Why don’t the planets crash into the Sun?

The orbital velocity of the planets keeps them from crashing into the Sun.  The planets move quickly enough, and with their gravity, it keeps them from falling into the Sun, instead they fall around the Sun.  Also the planets are so far apart that they don't play a factor on each other, so each planet can stay in its own orbit.

Physics Project PE and KE and a real house

So, here is a little blog post to explain the potential energy and kinetic energy within our experiment.

All of the houses have the potential energy to lift, if enough balloons are added.  The problem lies in how many balloons to add.  With each balloon we added to a house, the weight of the house was lowered.  We had to get the weight to be below 0 for it to actually life.  It was actually quite amazing how with the addition of just one more balloon the house would be ascending.  We could normally tell when we only needed one more balloon.  The house would be hovering above the table, or when we threw it up, the drag would keep it up for a bit before it came down slowly.  Once that last balloon was added, the kinetic energy kicked in and up went the balloon.  To show the importance of the precise amount of balloons, I will refer to our dojo house.  While taking it outside, two of the balloons popped.  The house still went up, but so slowly that the wind would get ahold of it and it would simply come back down.  Two balloons, they made a huge difference in the acceleration of our house.  With 70 balloons the house would go up quickly, and without problem.  But with only 68, the house went up significantly slower.

Also, a fun fact I suppose.  How many balloon would it take to lift a real house?  According to an internet website, a house can weight between 80,000 pounds to 160,000 pounds.  To life a house weight 80,000 pounds it would take roughly 12,271,691 balloons.
Yeah...that's a lot of balloons.

Day 7 Physics Project (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Day 7-

Today was spent making motion graphs, and contemplating data.  We did however make another small house that weighed I believe 29 grams (currently I am too lazy to reference my notes, so we will just go with 29 grams).  Halfway through tieing balloons onto the house, we realized we couldn't remember why we built the house.  So we got it to go up, and then we remembered it was so we could get some more data.  We timed how long it took to go up, and how high it went up.  So yay for data collection!

Day 7 Video (with a song that has nothing to do with flying)-

Physics Project Overview (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Video-

Pictures-

Diagram of Motion-

Example of Forces-

Harwood Diagram-

Day 6 Physics Project (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Day 6-

Today was a miraculous day.  Today our dojo/house thing took flight!  This was the heaviest of all of our houses (besides the first one we made that would take hundreds of balloons).  This house weighed 208 grams, and we at first estimated it would take around 60 balloons to lift.  So, like an assembly line, we began filling the balloons.  We had three helium tanks today so it did not take as long to fill so many balloons.  We got to sixty, and the house did not go up.  So we said probably around 70 balloons.  As soon as we put 70 balloons on there the house went up.

So now that the house went up, we decided we should measure how high it could go.  We took it outside, but this time we tethered it, so we wouldn't lose it.  On the way outside though two balloons popped, so this may have had something to do with why our house would not go up outside.  Yes folks, the flying house would not fly.  We tried, and tried, and tried, but it would only hover and then start traveling to one side.  We did get numerous strange looks though, so the experience was fun, but we couldn't get a real good measure on height seeing how it didn't go very high.  The roof then began coming off, and after the string getting stuck in a tree, we decided to call it a day.  We did not lose the house (thank goodness), but we took the roof off, let the balloons go, and then threw the rest of the house away.

Day 6 Video-

Physics Project Day 5 (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina)

Day 5

So, to be honest, nothing really happened today.  Sad, but true.  We got another tank of helium, in the hopes that it would fix our problem of always running out.  But we didn't have our second tank, so instead of wasting helium knowing it would not be enough to get a house up, we just worked on graphs and our prezi.  Nothing too interesting, so yeah.  But next time our cardstock house/dojo will fly (hopefully, probably...)

Day 5 Picture-

this is the new helium tank

Physics Project Day 4 (Reina, Jordan, and Sabrina)

Day 4-
So today we started by making a new cardstock house to replace our lost cardboard house.  We wanted to make it rather large, seeing how cardstock weighs less than cardboard.  So here are our new cardstock house dimensions-


Height- 0.3683 m
Depth- 0.2794 m
Width- 0.4318 m
Weight- 207 grams


 So the new cardstock house weighs 37 grams more than the cardboard house we lost.  It took thirty balloons to lift the cardboard house at 170 grams, so after some math and rough calculations we figured it would take around 35 balloons to life our new house. (Here is how the math went down- so for every 170 grams it takes 30 balloons, so 170 divided by 30 and rounded is 6.  So each balloon takes off 6 grams.  Now 207 divided by 6 rounded equals 35.)

This was based though on the balloons we used Monday, not the ones we used today, also my math could be wrong which could also explain why when we recalculated we saw it would take around 60 balloons.  With thirty balloons tied to the house the weight went from 207 grams to 120 grams.  So in this case for every 30 baloons the house weight went down by 87 grams.  So lets say we add another thirty balloons, the weight would then go down to 33.  Now divide 87 by 30, and rounded you will see that one balloon takes off three grams.  So we would need around 11 more balloons for those 33 grams.  So after all of this confusing math, it would take around 71 balloons to lift the house.  But the math could be wrong, and depending on how big we filled up the balloons we just decided to say it would take around 60 balloons (cause we could fill the balloons up with more helium than we had been.)

Wow, okay so now that you are probably all confused or just skipped that whole math part, I can say that we did not get the house to lift today.  We got up to 35 balloons and ran out of helium.  The 35 balloons did make a difference on the weight, but not nearly enough, so now we will try again on Monday

Day 2 Pictures in a Video!-