Ask for a picture of Mars for your classroom

SOFIA TIPPOO / TNN / Jun 21, 2005, 21:45 IST

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BANGALORE: If you are a student and want to take a picture of, say a volcano or a frozen lake on Mars, it is not a mere fantasy.

Ask for a picture of Mars for your classroom

BANGALORE: If you are a student and want to take a picture of, say a volcano or a frozen lake on Mars, it is not a mere fantasy.
As a part of your classroom activity all you have to do is write a proposal to the Mars Student Imaging Project stating the objectives of your science class and you can have your own exclusive picture that no one in this world and beyond would have.
Although hundreds of students from the US and Russia have their own exclusive pictures of the scarred Martian terrain for their class and themselves, unfortunately not a single student from India has done this, say the three visiting scientist from NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission and the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.
Michael Wyatt, James Rice and Amitabha Ghosh, part of the 100-strong team of astrogeologists who actually man the Rovers which landed on Mars on Jan 25, 2004 and is still taking pictures and sending them back to earth are here in India to make students realize that science is not boring but fun to learn.

When they are at work, they sit at their consoles, remotely drive the Rover on Mars, either zoom in or take wide angle shots of the cratered landscape including rocks and then analyse them to find out if the environment for life existed on Mars, where the warmest temperature range from zero degrees to 50 degrees Celsius, which incidentally is the coldest for our Earth and found only at the poles.
Says Wyatt who along with his colleagues has been meeting students at planetariums and science clubs in India, " The first question everyone asks is whether there is life there - it is a never-ending question that every single one of us wants to know, right from a kid fed on movies about aliens from Mars to us __ scientists from NASA."

But, the answer will elude everyone till 2009-11 when yet another Rover would be sent to Mars to take samples of rocks to check for fossils. "This one's goal is just to see if there was water and we have found that water did exist there. The next mission would be able to send data which would throw out some light on whether fossils exist on Mars," said Ghosh who incidentally is the only Indian on the Mars Mission. And, this question invariably follows, "What do I have to do to become a NASA scientist?"
To which scientist Rice replies," It takes a lot of people from different backgrounds to be a part of a NASA team. You could be a geologist, an engineer, a computer science graduate or even a biologist because those are the ones who are going to be needed for our next project to see if there is evidence of life. You should find something you love to do and just do it."

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