Recovery Systems Lab

During this lab, Lena, Alaina and I tried to counteract the force of gravity by using parachutes to create air resistance/ drag. We used plastic garbage bags, string, tape (to reinforce the holes), and a little sandbag weight. Our parachute consisted of two layers. The first one had a hole in the middle, about 4 inches in diameter and the second one (on top) didn't have any holes. there was about an inch of space between them when the air was blowing. Our model didn't work. The weight or the sand bag pulled the corners together so that they could not catch any air. We tried to reinforce the edges but it didn't work. We thought it might have worked better with a smaller bag, because ours was folding in half. This relates to Newton's third law because gravity pulls down with the same force the air pushes up with, but the earth is bigger, so gravity overcomes the drag created by the air. In this case we were trying to make the drag overcome gravity so that we could have the parachute float instead of fall. This relates to mission to mars because when you land on a planet (Mars) you have to have a pararchute to overcome the force of gravity because you don't want to crash into the ground, you want to get set down lightly. I also though that there could be some human error in our test because we only had one hair dryer in one particular place, but if you were falling from the sky, there would be the same amount of resistance and that might have had something to do with why our didn't work.nce in all places, so I think that might have had something to do with it.