“Where does this gravel come from?” is a question that you can ask about many places in the solar system—in the dirt on the playground and in the Gale Crater on Mars, now that the NASA Mars rover Curiosity has landed. Your playground gravel might have been dug up by the children or delivered by truck. Either way, children can think about where it was before they found it and how it got there. Or maybe the class can go on a fieldtrip to where there is a lot of gravel along a creek or on a beach. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars allows our wonderings to expand beyond our world:
“Curiosity’s landing site is beginning to come into focus,” said John Grotzinger, project manager of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “In the image, we are looking to the northwest. What you see on the horizon is the rim of Gale Crater. In the foreground, you can see a gravel field. The question is, where does this gravel come from? It is the first of what will be many scientific questions to come from our new home on Mars.”
Older students might like to see a photograph of the roomful of people who guided the NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity through its entry, descent and landing on Mars.
I wonder what early science and engineering experiences the NASA scientists and engineers had, those who designed Curiosity, the system that got it to Mars, and the experiments it will carry out on Mars. Did they get to dig in the dirt and wonder where the pebbles came from?
What scientific questions will your students explore this year?