Students Steer Red Rover Over ‘Alien’ Terrain

Tipsheet

STUDENTS STEER RED ROVER OVER ‘ALIEN’ TERRAIN

The Mars Sojourner rover may be out of commission, but fourth- and
fifth-graders at the Rice School are remotely controlling their own new models,
complete with a camera, and exploring “alien” Mars terrain that they created in
their classroom. The students are learning how scientists explore other planets
with remote systems.

The students will be operating their rovers on Dec. 11 and 12 from 1-2:30
p.m. at the Rice School, 7550 Seuss Drive.

More than 100 students formed 25 teams to design and build robotic vehicles
from LEGO kits. Using a computer to control the movement of their rovers, they
navigate them over a rocky, dusty Martian landscape. The computer software
mimics the control programs used by the scientists on the Pathfinder/Sojourner
mission to explore Mars.

In addition to learning about Mars, the students are learning how science can
be used for practical purposes: measuring distances by triangulation; how to use
the Internet; how gears work, how math can be applied to find speed and
distance. A Rice University professor and graduate students at the Keck Center
for Computational Biology, headquartered at Rice, are teaching the young
students.

Red Rover is a hands-on, educational project created by The Planetary Society
and brought to the Rice School by the Keck Center for Computational Biology.

Contact: Lia Unrau, Rice University News Office, (713) 831-4793, unrau@rice.edu, or Rice professor George
Phillips, (713) 527-4910.

The Planetary Society’s website for the Red Rover project is located at: http://planetary.org/explorers-red-rover.html.

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