Seventh Graders Find a Cave on Mars

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Source: Guy Webster, JPL News
Excerpt:  They went looking for lava tubes on Mars — and found what may be a hole in the roof of a Martian cave. The 16 students in Dennis Mitchell's 7th-grade science class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., chose to study lava tubes, a common volcanic feature on Earth and Mars. It was their class project for the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), …"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?" To answer the question, the students examined more than 200 images of Mars taken with the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), an instrument on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. …On their two targeted images the students found lava tubes, as they had hoped. And on the backup image, they also found a small, round black spot….

 www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm

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