Student Programs Tap Into Mars Rover Adventures
February 12, 2004
NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are not only providing
scientists a flood of information about Mars -- including new
insights today about winds -- they are also adding excitement
to classrooms throughout the nation.
An assortment of programs giving students first-hand
opportunities to work with information from NASA Mars
missions help young people "see themselves as scientists in
the future because they understand the process of science,"
said Sheri Klug of Arizona State University, Tempe, and
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. She
coordinates NASA Mars education programs for kindergarten
through high school, part of the agency's goal to inspire the
next generation of explorers.
Silver Stage High School in Silver Springs, Nev., is one of
13 schools participating in one program that pairs selected
students with researchers on the rover missions. "I actually
get the opportunity to work with the scientists. It's really
awesome!" said Shannon Theissen, 16, a Silver Stage junior.
Dr. Wendy Calvin, rover science team member from University
of Nevada, Reno, and Shannon's mentor for a week at JPL,
said, "This is the real stuff, not baby steps. The students
are using the same tools we do."
Hundreds of other students from around the country
participate in programs using pictures and other information
from NASA Mars orbiters, and more than 1,000 have sent in
rocks for a project to compare Earth rocks with Mars rocks.
Meanwhile, noted Art Thompson of JPL's rover flight team, "We
have two very busy rovers on the surface of Mars." On
Wednesday, Spirit broke its own record set earlier in the
week for the longest one-day drive on Mars. The rover added
24.4 meters (80 feet) to its odometer, bringing the total to
57.4 meters (188 feet) and ending its day near a cluster of
rocks dubbed "Stone Council."
In coming weeks, scientists and engineers plan for Spirit to
drive up to the rim of a crater dubbed “Bonneville," still
more than two football-field lengths away, in hopes of
peering inside and seeing rock layers that could tell the
geologic history and the potential role of water at the Gusev
site.
Opportunity drove Friday morning to the fourth
counterclockwise position in its survey of a rock outcrop
along the inner slope of the crater in which it landed. Based
on the survey, scientists will choose a small number of
locations on the outcrop to come back to for more thorough
examination later. The flight team has learned to compensate
for wheel slippage in the soil on the slope. "When we attempt
to drive up the slope we intentionally overdrive, and when we
drive down a slope we intentionally underdrive," Thompson
said.
Both rovers have used an infrared sensing instrument called
the miniature thermal emission spectrometer to study the sky,
as well as the ground. These atmospheric observations are
revealing rapid temperature changes in the lower atmosphere.
In mid-morning, the air temperature at about the height of an
eight-story building swings up and down by several degrees
within a minute.
"Warmer and colder blobs of air are intermittently passing
over the rover," said Dr. Don Banfield, a rover science team
collaborator from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "We're
watching the overturning of the atmosphere as it's warming up
in the morning." Rising warmer air carries heat to upper
layers of the atmosphere. Observing the details of these
changes helps scientists improve their models for
understanding Mars' winds.
Better understanding of Mars' winds is important not only for
the design of future landings on the planet, but also for
interpreting some features on the surface. "We've been
talking a lot about water on Mars in the past, but wind is
currently the important agent of change on Mars," Banfield
said.
Microscopic images indicate that windblown sand is eroding
the outcrop that Opportunity is studying. Dr. Mark Lemmon,
science team member from Texas A&M University, College
Station, said that taking a series of images with that
instrument at slightly different distances from the target
allows creation of a three-dimensional view. "We're
gathering as much information about the things we're looking
at as we possibly can," he said.
The main task for both rovers in coming weeks and months is
to explore for evidence in rocks and soils about whether the
landing-site areas ever had environments that were watery and
possibly suitable for sustaining life.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration
Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science,
Washington, D.C. Images and additional information
about the project are available from JPL at
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell
University at http://athena.cornell.edu. Information
about NASA school projects is available at
http://education.nasa.gov.
