Team X Status Report - Day 2

Today in science class we actually started constructing our egg lander. Last class we bought the materials we needed and I felt very anxious and confident about next class. But now that we have almost completed building our project I feel less confident that our egg will survive and/or will land close to a target. We built a pretty straight forward egg lander, It has a parachute and an egg holder. And the egg holder is attached to the parachute (half a trash bag). Even though it is straightforward lander it is very effective (If dropped high above the ground, if not, then it might not work). Every parachute relies on air resistance, air resistance makes a parachute work. Air resistance pushes the parachute the other direction it is falling. Because the material is very light and thin the wind affects it a lot. We have to drop our lander from 3 different heights. One height is not that high of the ground which does not allow our parachute to go into full effect. So that is what I am most worried about. I have a feeling that it will break on the first height. But there is one thing that might support the egg on the landing. We bought a lot of styrofoam peanuts, which we will surround the egg with. And that will hopefully prepare us for the energy transfer from the parachute to the ground. Another thing that isn’t going to well for us is that every time we test our lander with a golf ball instead of an egg the golf ball falls out of the lander when it lands.  So we need to find a solution for that. I mean it is not all bad for our egg. We some how managed to make a successful parachute and we used our money wisely if we wanted to make any changes we have the money necessary to. We have not finished our testing yet. But we will finish and it will give us vital information that we need to finish the lander. We are testing for the length of the string that attaches the egg holder and the parachute. We think that maybe the length of the string will affect the parachute

-Tareq