Students participate in mars sample return Rover field tests

The Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) Rover, a prototype vehicle designed to rehearse operations for the Mars Sample Return missions and associated Athena Rover, was put through a suite of field trials in the Silver Lake area of the Mojave Desert in April and October 1999. The trials also provided an opportunity to foster active involvement of students in rover missions using inquiry-based study An integrated team of more than two dozen high school students and their teachers from Los Angeles, Phoenix, Ithaca, and St. Louis (LAPIS) developed and implemented their own FIDO-based rover mission that employed long-distance traverses to explore terrains and make discoveries. LAPIS team members from each city were paired with local science mentors who are part of the Athena Science Team to ensure that the LAPIS activities furthered the overall mission objectives at Silver Lake and to provide expert advice.The students learned to work as a geographically distributed team, developed hypotheses to test, commanded the rover via the Internet to test their hypotheses, analyzed data, and generated their own Web site and archives. Post-LAPIS assessments demonstrated that the participants gained new communication and information technology skills, an enhanced ability to cut across traditional disciplines to solve problems, and a greater understanding of planetary exploration and discovery Further, for some of the students, LAPIS provided the right set of experiences needed to help them define specific career goals in science, mathematics, and engineering.