Inland Students Collect Data for NASA Mission
By DARRELL R. SANTSCHI / The Press-EnterpriseMORENO VALLEY - In the predawn hours Friday, even as their schoolmates were home asleep, 20 fourth- and fifth-graders reported for work at Northridge Elementary School in Moreno Valley.
They wiped the sleep from their eyes, munched doughnuts and Pop Tarts, and then set to work. Their job: to point a 34-meter radio telescope at the planet Mars 35 million miles away and collect radar mapping data.
Their efforts, in conjunction with work by schoolchildren at the Lewis Center for Educational Research in Apple Valley and classes in Pennsylvania, Washington and Iowa, will help determine whether a proposed landing site on the Red Planet is suitable for exploration.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is compiling their data and that of three other radio telescopes based at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex at Fort Irwin. They are making a detailed radar map of the Gusev Crater. If the terrain does not have dangerous obstacles and they find no soft spots where a space vehicle would sink into the ground, NASA will land a spacecraft there in January and send a golf cart-size rover in search of signs of water and past life.
Northridge students, working in teams of four in half-hour shifts, aimed their telescope and -- with an assist from some of their parents -- carefully plotted series of numbers fed to them by the telescope via the Internet.
"We are doing actual science," Northridge teacher Beth Sandez said. "It's not pretend. The children are actually doing science. They feel worthy. They're motivated. They're doing something important."
They were also a little tired.
"I like my sleep," said 9-year-old Adam Fletcher.
He peered at Mars through an optical telescope set up outside the classroom before going inside to take his turn at the controls.
"I saw Mars," he said, "but it was shaking in the telescope because there were radio waves bouncing off it. That was kind of cool."
Tedious work
Inside, the work was tedious. The students could watch their radio telescope move as they repositioned, but their attention was primarily focused on a wavy red line and a series of numbers that NASA scientists will use later at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena to build a three-dimensional Mars map.
"I think it means a lot" to the kids, said Adam's father, James Fletcher, who works at the Naval Service Warfare Center's Corona division in Norco, where computer analysts assess the effectiveness of Navy weapons systems.
"He's doing more interesting things than I do at work," Fletcher said.
Sandez had a few anxious moments, especially in the beginning, when the youngsters had trouble getting a signal.
But 10-year-old Jimmy Kollar patiently sorted through window after window on the computer, calmly typing in calibration settings fed to him by a voice at the Lewis Center over a speaker phone.
"A little while I was nervous," he said later, "but then I got it fixed. We just had to read the numbers a little slower."
His mother, Lynn Kollar, who teaches his fifth-grade class, said she had no doubt he would work through it.
"I was calm," she said. "I'm not as concerned about the outcome as the teachers who have been working on this for the last several weeks."
Sandez and fellow teacher Charlotte Groty attended a five-day radio astronomy course at Goldstone last year after learning about the Lewis Center's telescope at a conference in Sacramento the year before. The school used a staff-training grant to pay for the training and equipment and hopes to obtain another to erect a large screen so an entire class would be able to see data together as it streams in.
While each of the four-member teams worked at the computer Friday, the other students passed the time by making Mars rover replicas out of Styrofoam and rockets from Legos.
The second team of Northridge students, dubbed "Team Bravo" by their teachers, took the controls about the time a second glitch occurred. This time it was a loss of power at Goldstone.
The children waited patiently for five minutes while technicians at the NASA facility made repairs.
Efficient workers
In the end, the Northridge students were so efficient that they were given extra assignments. They collected background radio waves from a black hole, and then a quasar, to help scientists calibrate the radio telescopes.
Jimmy Kollar said he wasn't certain why he was doing everything he was assigned, "but it's fun doing it."
Groty said, "They're not going to understand everything 100 percent."
"We, as teachers in fourth grade, are way down here," she said, holding her hand out at waist level. "We're not up with the high school kids and the big scientists. But the kids have enough information that they know what they are doing."
She said she even has a couple who want to be astronomers.
"That's what we hope."
As the morning sun climbed in the sky and the teachers began cleaning up, the 20 students and their parents headed for the parking lot -- even as more than 660 youngsters were arriving in a procession of cars to start their school day.
"I think it went very well," Sandez declared. "The kids were very responsive to complications. It didn't throw them."
She said they're ready for their next space mission.
Reach Darrell R. Santschi at (909) 806-3067 or dsantschi@pe.com
Used with permission by The Press-Enterprise, 2003