Martian Robot Does Double Duty as Teachers’ Aide

As NASA’s interplanetary robot, Spirit, plummeted toward the rust-colored surface of Mars nearly three weeks ago, the mission’s scientists were not the only ones with a lot riding on whether the $410-million machine would survive the landing.

If it hadn’t, middle school science teacher Maureen Angle’s intra-galactic lesson plans would have been shot.

Since the start of the school year at McFadden Intermediate in Santa Ana, Angle has been eagerly awaiting the expedition in which Spirit, and a sister rover scheduled to land Saturday night, will search for signs of past water and life on the planet’s frozen surface. Angle says space is an ace in the hole for science teachers when it comes to keeping students’ attention. And when the rover emerged from its air bag cocoon intact, the energetic instructor was ready to go. “I knew [the mission] would be perfect for my classes,” she said.

Angle is one of thousands of teachers around the world who are capitalizing on the excitement surrounding the Mars project and using it to liven up courses such as geography, physics and even reading. NASA, with an eye toward replenishing its future ranks, has helped whip up the enthusiasm and invited a group of exceptional students to participate in the actual mission.

Her voice booming through a headset microphone, Angle recently kept her eighth-grade chemistry class enraptured with projected images of Spirit and Gusev Crater, the suspected lakebed where the rover landed. In their search for evidence of water, Angle explained, chemists would be analyzing the elemental makeup of the rocks and dust on the crater’s surface. She held aloft a chunk of gypsum, which forms from evaporated seawater, and wondered aloud whether something similar would be found on Mars.

“Remember,” she said, pointing to the large table of elements on the wall, “everything in the universe is made of that stuff.”

Angle gave a similar performance when her honors life science class filed in an hour later. But she tailored it toward a discussion on the definition of a living organism and its need for a hospitable habitat.

The lesson generated some heavy thoughts among Angle’s students, several of whom said her Mars presentation helped them visualize otherwise abstract topics. “Maybe the things up there,” pondered 12-year-old Alyssa Medina, “don’t need the same things we need down here, like air and water.”

Inevitably, talk turned to the prospect of putting humans on Mars, which President Bush announced last week would become a central NASA endeavor. With the technology to do so 20 to 30 years away, Angle said while scanning her classroom, “it’s going to be someone sitting in a seventh- or eighth-grade classroom right now who will be going. You’re the perfect age.”

That’s exactly what NASA is banking on and why space officials are concerned about a lack of interest and poor performance in science and math among American students.

The number of college undergrads pursuing engineering degrees has dropped 20% since the early 1980s, and nearly half the country’s 12th-graders score below levels of basic proficiency in science, said Adena Williams Loston, head of education programs for NASA.

The space agency, officials said, will spend more than $1 billion this year on education programs as part of a continuing effort to reverse these trends and cultivate future scientists.

NASA officials knew they had a golden opportunity in the Mars mission. An estimated total of 10,000 students showed up when NASA sent a group of young scientists from the mission’s team on a tour of schools and museums in five U.S. cities. There have been more than 2.5 billion hits on the agency’s website since Spirit’s Jan. 3 touchdown, more than it had in all of 2003. And, Loston said, hundreds of teachers each day have been contacting her offices in search of Mars educational material.

Wendell Mohling, the associate executive director of the National Science Teachers Assn., said the Mars mission is a valuable teaching opportunity. “Any time you can tie what you’re doing in the classroom to real-life events,” he said, “it builds a bridge for kids’ understanding.”

The teachers association and NASA teamed up to identify schools in some of the country’s poor and minority communities to receive extra help on studying the mission. Beyond awarding grants, the program gives students access to data from Mars and other explorations for classroom projects.

NASA also coordinated with the nonprofit Planetary Society to bring two high-school students each week to the command center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Courtney Dressing, a 16-year-old from Alexandria, Va., and Brazilian Rafael Morozoski spent the first week of the mission attending briefings, while working to log readings from Spirit’s sundial. The two typically worked through the night because Earth’s day does not correspond with Mars’.

“I would say it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity but I hope it won’t be,” Dressing said. “Being part of this mission has really given me a sense that this is what I want to do with my life.”

The work in the elective astronomy class at Dana Hills High School is less technical than Dressing’s, but instructor Rick Stinson readily integrated the Mars mission into his classes.

With a warm Dana Point sun beaming through the classroom door, Stinson recently kept his students’ eyes focused with “Six Minutes of Terror,” a slick NASA film on Spirit’s landing and the rover’s photographs of the planet posted on NASA’s website. He added that the mission has also helped him to drive home lessons on the physics of space travel, the scope of the distances involved and the obstacles to growing plants in Mars’ atmosphere.

His students had stared at Mars through a telescope earlier in the semester. Now, they debated the significance of the mission, as well as the possibility of finding water. “It is a big deal,” said 15-year-old Kendra Faust. “If they find water or life, this could be the next Earth.”

And like Santa Ana’s Angle, Stinson raised some eyebrows with the idea of a manned journey to the red planet. A floppy-haired, 16-year-old Frank DeLouch pondered the possibility. “It would be a totally new, totally different experience. If they need a guinea pig, I’ll do it.”