ASU Research E-Magazine: Field Trip of Dreams

Howling wind. Cracking ice. The mechanical whir of a robotic arm.

In today’s world of interplanetary research, children speculate about the data that the Mars Microphone will record during the Mars Polar Lander mission. They influence the design of spacecraft components, such as the Mars Sundial that will fly aboard the Surveyor 2001 lander. And once the Surveyor reaches its destination, they will help drive the rover and operate the lander’s robotic arm.

Sheri Klug directs ASU’s Mars K-12 Program. With the direct support of ASU planetary geologist Philip Christensen and his staff, she helps get teachers and children involved in these space exploration activities. Founded in 1992 as part of what is now known as ASU’s Mars Global Surveyor Space Flight Facility, the program has introduced thousands of school children and their teachers to the wonders of science through an up-close look at space exploration.

massive clouds of dust roll across the Martian surface
Tempe, Arizona experiences seasonal dust storms. this image of Tempe Terra on Mars shows a dust storm more than 100 kilometers wide.

Thanks to Klug and other like-minded researchers, children do more than just take tours, listen to lectures, and complete related assignments. They have become actual partners with NASA, the Planetary Society, and university scientists in current and planned missions to Mars.

The Martian sundial project presented just such an opportunity after Bill Nye, host of public television’s “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” noticed that the calibration target for the Mars panoramic camera resembled a sundial. Nye is a graduate of Cornell University. His alma mater developed the Surveyor lander’s Athena Precursor Experiment that includes the panoramic camera.

“Our ancestors made astonishing discoveries about the nature of the heavens and our place in it by closely watching the motion of shadows,” Nye said during an April 1999 press conference at Cornell to unveil the sundial design. “Now, at the dawn of the next century, we can make observations of new shadows, this time on another planet.”

Klug became drawn into the project through her connections to the Planetary Society. Her role included soliciting ideas from schoolchildren for the sundial’s design. More than 160 suggestions poured in from students both nationally and internationally. Rather than choose just one winner, the design team incorporated the themes that emerged from the kids’ suggestions.

“The children’s input was extremely valuable,” Klug says. “It was just so much fun seeing the science team really embrace the kids and their participation. It would have been a lot easier for them to say, let’s just make a dial and call it a sundial and that’ll be that. Instead, they really went after what the kids were thinking.”

The sundial measures three inches square. Machinists at the mechanical instrument shop in ASU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy built the sundial. Then it was photoetched at the University of Washington, where it also was designed.

Following the kids’ suggestions, the sundial was etched with the word Mars in 24 languages and with stick-figure drawings that will represent the people of Earth. Once the sundial reaches Mars in January 2002, it will reveal the passage of Martian time through images taken by the panoramic camera. Earthlings will be able to monitor the images via the Internet.

The Red Rover Goes to Mars project represents an even greater and unprecedented level of student participation in planetary exploration. This time, a student team will work with mission scientists and help to operate the 2001 lander’s Marie Curie rover and robotic arm.

The project is an outgrowth of the Red Rover, Red Rover program, a joint development of the Planetary Society, the Center for Intelligent Systems at Utah State University, Visionary Products Inc., and the LEGO company.

Student scientists participating in Red Rover Goes to Mars also will share their work and experiences via the Internet, delivering real mission data into homes, classrooms, and science centers worldwide.

Klug, again, is involved in the project as an education adviser, a role that predates her June 1998 appointment as director of the ASU Mars K-12 Program.

“There are now 400 Red Rover, Red Rover sites throughout the world. Sheri was one of the very first teachers to take that program and just run with it,” says Linda Hyder, manager of program development for the Planetary Society. Using computers linked through the Internet, Red Rover, Red Rover students teleoperate robotic rovers built from LEGO Dacta components.

“Red Rover Goes to Mars is going to be an amazing educational addition to a working mission,” Klug says.

The ASU Mars K-12 Program also serves as the clearinghouse for an essay contest that the Planetary Society is sponsoring to encourage students to imagine what Mars might sound like. By early May, Klug had already received more than 100 essays from students vying for the contest prize, a trip to Planetfest 1999 from Dec. 3 to 5 in Pasadena, Calif.

The Mars Microphone itself is sponsored by the society, the first time a scientific instrument has been funded by a public-interest organization to fly aboard a planetary mission.

The essay asks students to describe the sounds of Mars both today and 100 years from now. The planet could be quite different in a century, especially if humans arrive and establish colonies.

The children predict that the microphone will record both natural and mechanical sounds during the Mars Polar Lander mission. In 100 years, though, the kids would expect to hear everything from hover cars and to kids shrieking at a Martian amusement park, to no new sounds at all on an uncolonized Mars.

Yet another mission participation project sponsored by the Planetary Society, the Student NanoExperiment Challenge, has an informal ASU connection. After a student-designed NanoExperiment is selected through a competitively judged contest, it will be built and delivered to ASU graduate alumnus Joel Rademacher for mounting on the 2001 lander’s soil and dust experiment.

Rademacher went to work for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory following his graduation with an ASU master’s degree in aerospace engineering in 1996. Currently he oversees the assembly, environmental testing and operations planning of the 2001 lander’s soil and dust experiment.

The point of all these outreach activities, of course, is to fire the imaginations of children with an enthusiasm for science and space exploration. They could even end up changing some lives, just as Klug’s life was changed by an ASU-NASA outreach project.

In 1995, Klug taught science to gifted and talented students in three rural districts near Boise, Idaho. ASU selected her as one of 13 teachers to participate in the weeklong workshop and series of field trips to the Channeled Scabland near Spokane, Wash., with a group of Mars Pathfinder scientists and engineers.

“That week is still one of the highlights of my life. It was unbelievable,” Klug recalls.

The Scabland provided an Earth terrain similar to the Mars Pathfinder landing site. The workshop and field trip there motivated Klug to focus her career on space outreach. She began collaborating on outreach activities with the Planetary Society while pursuing a master’s degree in earth science education at Boise State University on a NASA Fellowship.

During the Planetary Society’s Planetfest ’97 in Pasadena, Klug and three other teachers from the Mars Pathfinder workshop conducted outreach workshops of their own. On July 4, 1997, their workshops complete, they watched via a live television link to the NASA control room as the scientists and engineers they had met in Washington celebrated Mars Pathfinder’s successful landing.

“We were all crying,” Klug says. “It was so emotional for us, having been shoulder-to-shoulder with those folks for so long. There just isn’t a better experience.”—Steve Koppes