Inland Students Help Map Mars Sites
SCIENCE: Youngsters in Apple Valley and Moreno Valley are collecting data for NASA researchers. By DARRELL R. SANTSCHI / The Press-EnterpriseAPPLE VALLEY- NASA scientists, with two spacecraft whistling toward Mars for landings in January, are undertaking a radar-mapping project to determine whether the landing sites are suitable.
The project relies on the calculations of Apple Valley middle school students -- with some mapping help from some fourth-graders in Moreno Valley.
The Apple Valley youngsters attend the Lewis Center for Educational Research, a charter school where kindergarten through 12th-grade students study the three R's: reading, 'riting and radar-mapping. Students as young as first-graders collect data from the cosmos using the school's own radio telescope, plucked out of mothballs and housed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goldstone radio telescope array at Fort Irwin.
The youngsters regularly listen in on planets, quasars and comets, feeding data to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La CaÄnada Flintridge near Pasadena.
"Some people don't believe it," 11-year-old Ethan Stockwell said of his class work. "I think it's pretty cool."
A typical day for the sixth-grader last week included taking out the trash, mowing the lawn and scanning a black hole.
Black holes are dark regions of space, believed to be caused by collapsing stars, with gravity so strong even light cannot escape. Measuring the background radio signals given off by the black hole provided the scale the students needed before pointing their telescope at Mars on Wednesday and determining the precise angle to aim their dish.
" These kids are good," said Albert Haldemann, deputy project scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover project. They're so good, and their telescope is so unencumbered with space chores, Haldemann said, "that their data will be used to calibrate our three other antennas" for the Mars mapping. Mars is a hot target because, on Aug. 27, the planet will be about 35 million miles from Earth, closer than it has been since 57,617 B.C., scientists say.
The project
For the mapping, Goldstone is transmitting a radar signal from its 70-meter radio telescope, bouncing it off Mars and then capturing the return signal on four telescopes, including the 34-meter telescope operated by the Lewis Center.
Through the rest of this week, the Lewis Center middle school students are periodically handing off control of their telescope via the Internet to students in Ohio, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Moreno Valley.
Fourth-graders at Northridge Elementary School in Moreno Valley will take the controls at 4:30 a.m. Friday and operate the telescope for 2 1/2 hours.
Haldemann, the NASA scientist, said in a telephone interview that the radar signals collected by the students will be used in consort with data from the other radio telescopes to develop a three-dimensional picture of the two landing sites.
" We pretty much think the landing sites are safe," said David MacLaren, director of educational research and development at the Lewis Center. "This (radar map) will tell them the overall roughness and smoothness of the terrain and how driveable the landing area is. "
The cameras mounted on the two spacecraft have only a limited field of vision, MacLaren said, but the golf-cart-sized rovers aboard them each is capable of driving 10 hours and covering 100 yards a day.
" NASA needs to know whether the rovers will sink into the soil or whether there are any hazardous rocks around," he said.
The school
Excitement over the latest Mars mission figures to focus attention on the Lewis Center, a charter school operated by the Apple Valley Unified School District that has an enrollment of 1,007 students and a waiting list of 1,700 more.
Apple Valley students get priority in admission, MacLaren said, but pupils commute to the school from as far north as Lancaster, as high in the mountains as Big Bear Lake and as far south as Palm Desert.
A year before the school opened in 1997, NASA decided to retire a 34-meter radio telescope at Goldstone that tilts up and down in a north-south direction, but doesn't have the mobility of newer models, said Marie Massey, Goldstone's educational outreach coordinator.
A volunteer at the Lewis Center who works at Goldstone passed the news along. That's when Lewis Center founder Rick Piercy stepped in.
" He just called up NASA and asked if we could have it," MacLaren recalled. "When we got a flight simulator out here we just called the Pentagon and asked, 'Who's in charge of flight simulators?' So we got one. Sometimes it's just being innocent enough to ask."
When NASA agreed, he said, "We were thinking at this point that we'd go get it in a pickup truck and put the telescope on our playground."
It wasn't until they arrived at Goldstone, MacLaren said, that school officials discovered that the radio telescope "takes up a quarter of an acre and weighs a million pounds."
Now they operate the telescope from remote computer terminals in a Mission Control-style classroom on the Apple Valley campus. Web cameras allow the students to see the telescope as they tilt it.
Future plans
When the Apple Valley students aren't radar-mapping planets, they tune into the faint, inaudible radio waves emitted from objects in space.
" If you took all the waves we collect with this telescope in an entire year, hooked it up to a battery and the light in your refrigerator, it would only light your bulb for a thousandth of a second," MacLaren said.
But it is enough to so enthrall the students that they line up after school to use the telescope. " I like space and learning about the solar system," said Arik Flores, 11. He cleaned his room, made his bed and picked up after the dog at home to get a shot at staying after school.
Emilie Rizzo, an 11-year-old home-schooling student, said she was one of the first to sign up for the class last fall." I've always wanted to be an astronomer," she said.
" Our goal is not to create radio astronomers," MacLaren said. "It's kind of nice that it happens. We want to communicate to parents and students the relevance of science. We want kids to experience real science, which is a little bit different than what you read in textbooks."
After the Mars mapping, the Lewis Center students won't have long to rest on their laurels. They will be busy measuring the strength of a radiation belt around Jupiter next month when NASA plunges the Galileo spacecraft into the planet's atmosphere.
Someday astronauts may owe their survival to the data the students are collecting, MacLaren said. "This is not like some homework that winds up in the trash can."
To reach Darrell R. Santschi at (909) 806-3067 or dsantschi@pe.com
Used with permission by The Press-Enterprise, 2003