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Hey guys I'm Jonathan and I am part of the lander team. The goal of the lander team in to build a structure that can succesfully keep an egg from breaking and land upright when thrown down a fligh of stairs. This week has been pretty hectic trying to come up with a design for our lander to completing it and then finding the physics of it and how Newtons Three Laws of Motion apply to the lander. At the beginning of last week Ty and I tried to come up with a basic blueprint for how we wanted the lander to be built. After we decided how we want the lander to be built, it was time to actually build it. While Ty was working on a cage made out of straws to hold the egg, I was working on the outer shell, which will be used to protect that cage when it is thrown down the stairs. I strarted out cutting PVC pipe to make the base of lander. I then cut several pieces of plastic tubes to act as the wall itself and taped them to the PVC pipe. Finally I taped five batteries to the PVC pipe, but ended up taking one off because the lander weighed too much. After four or five days I had finished the outer layer of the lander. We then connected the egg cage that Ty had been working by placing it in the middle of the lander and strapping it to the outer shell using rubbber bands and hooks. After testing it with an egg a few times and tweaking it so that the egg would not fall out, we had competed the lander. We then worked on finding the physics of the lander, such as the velocity and then wrote a paper (which you can see on our website) about how Newtons Three Laws of Motion not only affect the lader, but how the lander usees the Laws of Motion to succesfully protect the egg as it travels down a flight of stairs. Now we are looking up different rocks and mineral that could be found on Mars so that we are prepared to anlyze the terrain when we draw a map of the site on mission day. I think that our entire Cygnus 2 team is working extremely hard, particularly Ryan and Scott who are doing a great job building our rover. I am positive that we will have a successful mission. See you later!! |
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