MONS: Part 1

After working on my classroom in anticipation of the move to a new position as a Teacher of Physics at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, VA (far from finishing, by the way), I'm also working with a couple of Master Teachers as a part of the Mars Outreach for North Carolina Students (MONS).  This is a grant-funded group of students who have applied to be a part of the opportunity.  My friends call this "Smart Camp," but it's really just a group of motivated students who are not always at the top of their class rankings.  One group is using state-of-the-art imaging software to study characteristics of Mars geology, today concentrating on Gale Crater, one of the proposed landing sites for Curiosity, the newest Mars Rover, set for launch in November of 2011.  The software will be discussed in later posts.  Another group is studying thermal inertia for soil having a shallow water table.  Once again, more about this in a later post.  The third group is building a robotic arm which will use an infrared sensor to measure thermal inertia remotely.  This will also be discussed at length in a later post.  Just for clarification, the studies were largely suggested by Dr. Jeff Moersch from the University of Tennessee.  The robotic aspect was started last year by a group that is now getting ready to go off to college, and was enlarged by three students who are currently in high school.  This program was initiated by Howard Lineberger from Durham Academy in Durham, NC, and Sam Fuerst of Northern Durham HS, also located in Durham, NC.  More information about "the early days" of this program may be found at http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/1667.pdf.  More in the next post!