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Hiking Boots Required: tough trekking in the name of science education

March 4, 2005

Elementary school teacher Andrew Marshall snapped this photo of his fellow educators on the Mars Remote Sensing field trip hike through Granite Wash in Arizona.
Image credit: Andrew Marshall/NASA/JPL

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Every year, ambitious elementary, high-school, and community-college teachers brave the Arizona desert to experience Mars exploration first-hand. One of over 35 teacher workshops around the United States each year, the extra-special field trip takes place near the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which leads education for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. [Upcoming Workshops]

Granite Wash Mountain perches an hour and a half west of Phoenix, and is a field geologist's dream location for studying the history of Earth and, by analogy, of Mars. Within a 10-foot stretch of dazzling dirt, Granite Wash reveals the same 400-million-year history of rock layering found in the Grand Canyon. It also happens to be home to the largest cacti population in the United States.

This image shows Kelly Bender swatting with her arms outstretched around a prickly cholla cactus. The cactus has about 25 canned-food-sized pods that are lime green with thousands of sharp needles jutting out in every direction. Kelly is smiling.

Kelly Bender, a planetary geologist and Mars Odyssey Orbiter instrument planner, jokingly "hugs" a cholla cactus as she guides the teachers on the field trip.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL

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Enter the land of flying cacti and step into science

Granite Wash is covered with a fuzzy kind of cactus called "cholla" (pronounced "choya"), which is somewhat misnamed "Teddy Bear Cactus" for its look, but certainly not its feel. An encounter with a cholla is like a meeting with an adorable Gremlin gone mad. While learning the art of space science, teachers have to dodge a few bullets in the form of sharp, flying cacti needles. "It's like getting shot by a 12-gauge," yelps Christina Scott after an encounter with a cholla. Scott is a NASA Aerospace Education Service Program specialist who travels the Western United States teaching space science.

This picture shows Dr. Christensen smiling as he stands nearby five teachers who are bending down to investigate the desert rocks ranging in size from an inch in diameter to 4 inches. Christensen is about 6 feet tall and has short brown hair.

Dr. Phil Christensen, NASA Principal Investigator for 4 instruments at Mars and Professor of Geological Sciences at ASU, leads teachers on a martian adventure in the Arizona desert.
Image credit: NASA/JPL

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Answering geology questions along the way, ten veteran hikers guide the teachers on their journey. The guides are ASU students who work under the mentorship of Dr. Phil Christensen. With a calming presence and a sophisticated ability to enlighten everyone from a grandmother to a grandchild about space, Christensen is an enthusiastic researcher who designed and operates instruments on four spacecraft currently at Mars.

With minds aglow, the staff at the Mars Space Flight Facility are entertaining and instructive. Christensen breaks his own cholla-safety rule and wears shorts, grad students encourage teachers to donate carrots to the cacti as peace offerings, and Christensen jokingly suggests that everyone ask their hardest questions to the one undergraduate guide.

This image shows Lisa Ogle in the middle of the desert on the side of a hills, throwing a few carrots onto a large cactus with 50 prickly pods. Lisa stands about 5 feet 2 inches tall, wears jeans, a t-shirt, a red-and-blue-checkered flannel, hiking boots, a large blue backpack, sunglasses, and a hat. She has a clear lunch baggy filled with cut orange carrots. Lisa is about 35 years old with blond hair.

Lisa Ogle, NASA Ames Aerospace Education Service Program, specialist performs a carrot sacrifice to the cholla cactus.
Image credit: NASA/JPL

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Tim Glotch, Shawn Wright, and Craig Weeks huddle together on the desert surface to look over a brightly multi-colored infrared map that Tim Glotch holds and points to as he squats. Tim is about 30 years old, has a stubbly beard, wears sunglasses and a hat with a t-shirt and cargo pants. Shawn Wright sits cross-legged, wearing a white brimmed hat, a backpack, t-shirt and jeans. Craig Week's head peers in from the far right of the picture. Craig wears a brown baseball hat, glasses, and has a light-brown mustache.

In the Arizona desert, post-doc researcher from Caltech, Dr. Tim Glotch (far left), and graduate student Shawn Wright from ASU (middle), show Craig Weeks (far right), a high school science teacher, how infrared spectroscopy works on Mars.
Image credit: NASA/JPL

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Colorful mineral maps transform an understanding of Earth and Mars

Amidst the fun, some deep learning is going on. Passing outcrops of bright, white quartz and Dr. Seuss-style flora, teachers wander over the largely brown terrain, armed with a special colorful map of the area. "Take one step, and you may go from a 'purple' area to a 'green' one," Christensen points out. The maps are created by spacecraft instruments called spectrometers, which detect different minerals on the surface of Earth. Each color on the map represents a different mineral. An otherwise uniform desert landscape suddenly transforms into a richly diverse mineral landscape.

This is a composite image of two different data sets taken by spacecraft orbiting Mars. The underlying image is a black and white photo of the surface of Mars that reveals over 400 craters of varying size and river channels that are now dry. The image was taken from 250 miles above the surface of Mars and shows an area of a few hundred square miles. On top of the black, white, and grey photograph, a rainbow of tiny square blocks of colorized data sprawl in the center of the picture. Red is concentrated in the center of the image, with yellow, light green, and light blue streaming outward from the center red in a mainly horizontal direction.

Mineral data taken by TES on Mars Global Surveyor is overlain on an Odyssey orbiter daytime THEMIS image. This Mars hematite abundance map became a landing site map for the Opportunity rover. Red is the highest concentration of hematite.
Image credit: NASA/JPL

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Teachers get a real sense of how orbiters at Mars provide similar mineral maps, pointing the way to exciting spots for rovers to explore. For example, Christensen's instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter revealed a telltale mineral called hematite, which usually forms in the presence of water. That mineral map led scientists to choose the area, Meridiani Planum, as a good rover landing site to test whether Mars ever had a watery environment necessary for life. Within weeks of landing there, the Mars rover Opportunity confirmed Mars could indeed have been a past habitat. Without spectrometers detecting more than the eye can see, the rover's desert environment might have seemingly stretched into sameness, much as the area traversed by the teachers.

Laurie Steed holds three pop-sickle sticks in the shape if a 'Y' as she attempts to put a rubber band around on stick. Laurie wears a brown, short-sleeved blouse and has chin-length blond hair. Sherri Jackson is talking to Laurie, encouraging her in the rocket launch activity. Sherri has wispy black hair and wears a fleece black jacket. Laurie and Sherri sit at a white table covered with two rulers, scissors, pencils, and worksheets.

Teachers Laurie Steed from Salt Lake City, Utah and Sherri Jackson from Albuquerque, New Mexico learn to make rocket launchers on day three of the workshop.
Image credit: NASA/JPL

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Bringing the field trip home to students

The day before becoming field geologists, teachers experienced a 9-hour adrenaline rush of knowledge administered by six Mars researchers and a few engineers from the Mars Odyssey orbiter team. Absorbing a semester's worth of geology and electrical-engineering courses, the mental sweating began early on day one.

Day three, after the field trip, the 40 teachers joined 100 other educators in a state-fair-style exhibit, where they learned hands-on activities to share with their students. Craig Weeks, who teaches earth and space science to high-school freshmen, came to increase his knowledge of Mars. "I'm here to go out into the field and pick up on user-friendly science. Like my students, I learn better when I go out and do things," said Weeks. "I want kids to get a glint in their eyes about the science process and have a real game plan for getting answers to their questions."

The image shows the right side view of Gaylon McSmith, who squats on what is called the 'desert pavement,' which is a natural layer of various rocks all settled down to the same height in a smooth pavement-like manner. Gaylon is about 50 years old, has grey hair and wears glasses, a tan brimmed hat, jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a bright blue backpack. Gaylon is reaching for a rock and looks like he is concentrating on figuring out what the rocks are made of. Behind Gaylon, eight other field-trippers stand and look down at the rocks or look at their infrared maps of the area.

Gaylon McSmith, Odyssey Science Operations Manager from JPL, investigates rocks in Granite Wash to compare and "ground-truth" them with mineral data collected by an infrared instrument on an airplane that flew over the same area.
Image credit: NASA/JPL

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This photo shows Marci Levy leading a single-file line of 12 teachers climbing up a steep path on the edge of a mountain. Marci has shoulder-length brown hair and wears brown sunglasses. The teachers behind Marci all wear hats and backpacks as they wind down 200 yards against a rocky, cactus-strewn hillside. Far below the mountain, hundreds of cacti pepper the valley.

Marci Levy, a high school teacher from Brooklyn, New York leads a pack of dedicated educators up a steep mountain in Arizona to learn about martian geology.
Image credit: NASA/JPL

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"When teachers do field work, they can bring back to their students an experience of what scientific discovery is really like. We want them to know science is not all in books. It's adventurous, not a walk in the park." And, Christensen adds with a characteristic twinkle: "Sometimes, hiking boots are required!"