Make Your Own Craters

While we're on the subject of lunar impactors, I feel the need to share a fun crater activity with you. This one is very easy and easily adaptable to just about any age audience. The supplies you will need include:

- a large pan or tub (a pie tin could work, as well as a baking pan, but don't use anything breakable)
- flour
- Nestle Nesquik, instant hot chocolate powder, cocoa powder or any other brown powder you can find
- pebbles, marbles, other spheres of varying sizes and masses

First, you'll put a layer of flour at the bottom of your pan. Make it at least half an inch thick, up to an inch if possible. Smooth out your flour. Next, put a thin layer of chocolate powder over the flour so that none of the chocolate shows. Finally, make your craters!
This is the part that you can adapt very easily. You can choose to use the same size/mass object and drop it into the powder from varying heights (or throw it at varying speeds, but dropping from different heights achieves the same result with better accuracy); or you can see what different objects dropped from the same height do. Try throwing your pebbles onto the tray at an angle.
As the objects impact the powder, the flour will come out from under, simulating the way subsurface materials are brought to the surface during an impact event. In addition, the contrast of the white flour and brown powder make it easy to see the impact sites and details.
There are a million variations on this one out there, but the Night Sky Network has a good one available online as part of a suite of activities for LCROSS; you can get the PDF here.