Skip to main content

7th-Graders Discover Mysterious Cave on Mars

A group of seventh-graders in California has discovered a mysterious cave on Mars as part of a research project to study images taken by a NASA spacecraft orbiting the red planet.
The 16 students from teacher Dennis Mitchell's 7th-grade science class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., found what looks to be a Martian skylight — a hole in the roof of a cave on Mars. The intrepid students were participating in the Mars Student Imaging Program at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University. The program allows students to frame a research question and then commission a Mars-orbiting camera to take an image to answer their question.
The newfound hole on Mars resembled features seen on other parts of Mars in a 2007 study by Glen Cushing, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist. Cushing suggested that these anomalous pit craters are like skylights — places where a small part of the roof of a cave or a lava tube had collapsed, opening the area below the surface to the sky. The caves are thought to result from volcanic activity on the red planet. At some point lava channels likely carved out caverns in the rock, and then left behind tunnel, or "lava tubes," when the eruptions were over. They would have been covered when a solid ceiling of cooled material settled on top, and then sections of the ceiling likely collapsed at some point to form the skylight entrances.
Scientists aren't sure what type of materials or deposits could be stored inside.
"This pit is certainly new to us," Cushing told the students. "And it is only the second one known to be associated with Pavonis Mons." He estimated the pit to be approximately 620 by 520 feet (190 by 160 meters) wide and 380 feet (115 meters) deep at least. The young researchers had initially set out to hunt for lava tubes, a common volcanic feature on Earth and Mars.
"The students developed a research project focused on finding the most common locations of lava tubes on Mars," Mitchell said. "Do they occur most often near the summit of a volcano, on its flanks, or the plains surrounding it?"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Outrank Your Competition in Google with our SEO Packages

Top Ranking SEO provides you with a service to increase your Google rankings by  hiring Google Certified Experts . First, you should understand why a Google Certified Expert is required. Google Certified Experts help your website improve search engines when a user visits the first five websites that appear after search, so it's important to rank your site among the top ten results. Google Certified Experts help your website in one of the best placements. Google Certified Professionals not only provide SEO services, but also help improve user experience and ease of use of your website. The fact is that the user has great confidence in Google's top 10 results, so our Google Certified Expert ensures that your site wins this site and the trust of users and visitors. If you'd like to  promote your website , you should use Google Certified Experts, where we provide social promotion for your website. If you have a large web site, it is important that you use SEO to survive and thu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Best Links for Education Powerful Backlinks

http://blogger.psu.edu/ http://blogs.berkeley.edu/ http://statemuseum.arizona.edu/ http://blog.uwgb.edu/ http://gsc.mit.edu/blog/ http://www.career.umkc.edu/ http://blogpublic.lib.msu.edu/ http://www.dmu.edu/blog/ http://www.amcollege.edu/ http://aar.slu.edu/ http://abroadblogs.newpaltz.edu/ http://aceop.wvstateu.edu/ http://blog.admissions.cornell.edu/ http://admissions.fsu.edu/ http://admissions.ncsu.edu/ http://aearu.ntu.edu.tw/ http://ag.arizona.edu/ http://aipi.clas.asu.edu/ http://aiti.mit.edu/blog/ http://alg.umbc.edu/usaq/ http://alumni.brandeis.edu/ http://alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/ http://tomprofblog.mit.edu/ http://answer.rutgers.edu/blog/ http://antarctica.uab.edu/blog/ http://aphia.rso.siuc.edu/ http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/ http://apps.exploratorium.edu/ http://apps.pathology.jhu.edu/ http://archery.berkeley.edu/ http://architecture.tulane.edu/ http://asiahealthpolicy.stanford.edu/ http://asic.union.edu/ http://asunews.asu.edu/ http://www.rioredstorm.com/ http://atif...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Bones Grow in Body

When you were a baby, you had tiny hands, tiny feet, and tiny everything! Slowly, as you grew older, everything became a bit bigger, including your bones. A baby's body has about 300 bones at birth. These eventually fuse (grow together) to form the 206 bones that adults have. Some of a baby's bones are made entirely of a special material called cartilage (say: kar-tel-ij). Other bones in a baby are partly made of cartilage. This cartilage is soft and flexible. During childhood, as you are growing, the cartilage grows and is slowly replaced by bone, with help from calcium. By the time you are about 25, this process will be complete. After this happens, there can be no more growth — the bones are as big as they will ever be. All of these bones make up a skeleton that is both very strong and very light. more...
Post a Comment
Read more