7th Graders Find Large Cave On Mars

A newly discovered cave on Mars was found as the result of an interesting crowdsourcing project. As EMB Numbers writes, "CNET news reports that 'the science class from Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., found the opening while working on a research project with the Mars Space Flight Facility run out of Arizona State University in Tempe. ... The students examined more than 200 images of Mars taken with the Thermal Emission Imaging System (Themis), an instrument on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.' The only other similar opening near the volcano was found in 2007, when Glen Cushing, a scientist with the US Geological Survey, published a research paper on the surface anomalies. The opening is estimated to be 620 by 520 feet and the hole to be at least 380 feet deep."

Just kidding, folks.

[clone53421]

I looked at the pictures, and it seems that they had a bug on the lens.

In all seriousness, though, I wonder how they can determine the depth of the hole, just from the surface characteristics?

Re:Wow .. Grade 7 has changed

[Anonymous Coward]

I kinda suspect that this is a function of the teacher's willingness to reach out to the university and actively participate in the science than it is any kind of sign of the times.

I would wager that most 7th grade classes still look at the cells in an onion skin or whatnot.

I further wager that 25 years ago there was a 7th grade science class designing experiments for the STS-51 (Challenger) flight, just no /. to report on it.

Re:Wow .. Grade 7 has changed

[lawpoop]

When I was in high school, there was a class called Space Tech. It was a combination shop and science class. We built our own telescopes, learned about the inverse square law, how to calculate the age of the universe, build a container for instruments that were supposed to withstand heat and cold, and used image processing programs to look for unusual geological features on images of the planets.

The final was a shuttle simulation. The class was broken into teams. One team build robotic arms to perform actions in space, another was the crew that spent the night in an old room converted to a shuttle simulation, and a few other teams I can't remember. I was on the media team, and it was our job to talk to the different crews and make press releases. We released them on K12 newgroups. Back in 1994, this was really awesome, and I had no idea what we were doing. Little did we know, the teacher had some students from another of his classes send us an email claiming to be from the FAA advising us to take our vehicle out of airspace, or something to that effect. It was 1994, I had no internet savvy -- this was before spam and everything -- so I took it to the teacher. He laughed.

It was a great class. Go Mr. Donelson at Gahanna Lincoln!