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Education: Learn: Off-world students?: Out of this world: The spate of recent missions to Mars

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 January 2004, 06:00 CST

While Nasa staff are celebrating the successful landing of Spirit, the fourth American "rover" to reach the surface of Mars since 1975, the UK's Beagle 2 has gone missing. This has generated all sorts of fascinating issues ripe for discussion in the classroom. And the subject has the potential to bridge the gap between disciplines, particularly English and science.

Off-world students?

Begin by testing whether or not your pupils have been living "off- world" for the last six months by quizzing them about their knowledge of Mars and their thoughts about why humankind is so fascinated by our nearest planetary neighbour. Younger students might enjoy discussing their ideas of what Martians look like when provided with some ideas of the cold, dust, lack of water and low gravity on the planet.

Provoking Martian thoughts

An inspiring beginning involves playing "Mars", the first movement in Holst's Planet Suite. Get students to jot down ideas, images or narrative that the music suggests. These rough ideas can be shared or used to build more considered accounts or descriptions later on.

Missions to Mars

The recent history of Martian exploration began in 1965, when the US's Mariner 4 provided the first detailed images of the planet's surface. Since then the discoveries and mysteries surrounding the planet have grown. Opportunities exist to research aspects of the current missions. For example, students could investigate why the two rovers chose the landing sites they did. This in turn would help them catalogue the challenges that Beagle 2 had to overcome.

For equipment to reach the Martian surface intact requires a fantastic number of things to go right, all prompted by signals travelling across space. If Beagle managed to reach the right angle for its entry into the Martian atmosphere, it faced rocks, dust and gullies on the landing site.

Pin-point landings are not possible yet on Mars, so Beagle and Spirit had to rely on gas-filled balloons to insulate them as they bounced across the landscape. Then there was the danger of Beagle's solar panels not opening, depriving it of the power it needed to communicate and conduct its sub-surface investigations using its single robotic arm.

Information on the hazards could be collected from newspapers and websites including the UK's National Space Centre. These can be used to create Beagle 2's first person account of its experiences and fate.

Mars: imagination and fact

Early people equated Mars's redness with blood and often saw it as an embodiment of the god of war - Ares for the ancient Greeks and then Mars for the Romans. This can be compared with the scientific reasons for the colour, now known to be the high rates of oxidation on the planet, which turn the iron in the Martian "soil" rusty.

The influence Mars has had on our thoughts over the centuries could be explored. Why not provide students with some of the key people involved in the Mars story as a prompt for independent research or by offering pre-prepared material designed for re- arrangement on a timeline? The list would include Galileo and the 17th-century astronomer Kepler, who first described Mars's elliptical orbit.

Science fictions

Such a list would also have to feature Giovanni Schiaparelli, the first man to spot distinct "channels" on the planet's surface. His use of the Italian "canali" suffered mistranslation into the English word "canals". The mistake generated a flowering of imaginative writing, begun by the amateur American astronomer Percival Lowell, who proposed the existence of a sophisticated Martian civilisation stuck on their dying planet and desperately trying to use the "canals" to cope with drought.

An account of the cultural impact of Mars should also feature the 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation of War of the Worlds (recordings available). It sent thousands of Americans into a panic when aired, and the incident provides an opportunity to explore the power that radio had then as a trusted source of information. How does this compare with our belief in the messages we receive via the media? Could a modern audience be taken in in the same way?

Life on Mars

Fabulous scenery has been revealed on Mars, including the volcano Olympus Mons, which rises from a base larger than Britain, or the 2,500-mile long rift, Valles Marineris. Coupled with information about the temperatures, surface pressure and composition of the planet and selected geographical desert scenery vocabulary, students could attempt to create a guidebook for the first tourists.

Finally, talk of human landings on Mars raises questions about the need for Martian exploration, and the political capital that space exploration can bring. If students had the trillion dollars it might take to land a person on Mars, would they spend it in this way?

Resources on learnpremium.co.uk

Students and teachers can find more about Mars and space exploration on learnpremium. co.uk, the Guardian's subscription- based schools resources website. Learnnewsdesk, learn premium's news site for nine- to 14-year-olds, explores the subject in detail in this week's news in focus, using extracts from the Guardian and the Observer. Students can also read news reports in the sci ence section of learnnewsdesk. There are comprehensive lessons on the solar system and beyond in KS3 science and KS2 primary packs, and whiteboard activities on Earth, sun and moon

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