Our space program may have just found its greatest untapped asset: middle schoolers. A large cave or lava tube, estimated to be at least 380 feet with an opening estimated to be 620 feet by 520 feet, was found by the seventh grade class from Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, California. Those are some overachievers.
And no, this wasn’t some fluke where one of the kids pointed to a screen during a field trip and said “What’s that?” These students were doing a real research project with precisely this objective, working with the Mars Space Flight Facility which is run from Tempe, Arizona.
The teacher describes the project to CNET as though this level of rigor were common among middle school students:
“The students developed a research project focused on finding the most common locations of lava tubes on Mars,” said their teacher, Dennis Mitchell. “Do they occur most often near the summit of a volcano, on its flanks, or the plains surrounding it?”
When I was in seventh grade, I couldn’t even build a mobile that stayed balanced. Who are these students? Well, whoever they are, they spent a good deal of their time thinking not about budding romance and algebra tests, but images of the Martian plain. The students scoured over 200 images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (Themis) of NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter.
The only other pit like this was found in 2007 by U.S. Geological Survey member Glen Cushing, who told the students, “This pit is certainly new to us.”
What will these students do in eighth grade, find Atlantis?
God I hope so.
(Via CBS News via CNET via Slashdot)
