Editing Crater Box (section)

===Short Explanation===
Crater formation is easy to see and understand. An object comes in from outer space, strikes a planet or moon, and that impact results in a hole on the surface. We can replicate this using this box of sand and set of balls, and look at what you need to make bigger craters.

When you drop the different balls in at different heights, you see that the more mass the ball has, the bigger the crater it makes. This is because the amount of energy our ball has depends on two things: how big it is, and how fast it is going when it hits the sand. Since we are dropping the balls instead of throwing them, we can have them all be moving at about the same speed when they hit the sand. This means that the only thing that changes the outcome is how much mass each ball has. In other words, the bigger and heavier the ball, the bigger the hole it will make!

We can see that the craters are all forming in similar ways, whether they are big or small. This is because craters have three stages of formation. The first stage is the '''Contact Stage''', when the ball hits the surface. The second stage is the '''Excavation Stage''', when some of the sand is sent flying by the impact, and we see the hole widen up from the ball's impact. The final stage is the '''Modification Stage''', when we see the walls of the hole collapse a bit, and the flying sand lands again. The craters are not very big, however, and that is because it takes a lot of energy to make the sand move out of the way ''without'' scooping it. In fact, to double how wide the hole is you need to drop the ball eight times higher, and to double how deep it is you would have to drop the ball from sixteen times higher!