"MISSION TO MARS: Henryville students build Mars rovers"

"HENRYVILLE — NASA’s latest mission to Mars is providing a unique experience for Henryville High School students to learn about what it takes to make a rover successful on the red planet, which educators say they hope can help inspire students toward future careers.

Students in teacher Donna Gatza’s Biology classes are spending seven weeks of their 18-week semester on a series of projects related to the Mars rover Perseverance, which launched July 30 and landed Feb. 21 in the Jezero Crater on Mars. The mission’s aim is to seek signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples, potentially to take back to Earth.

“NASA has provided all kinds of incredible activities for the kids to learn hands-on, to be exposed to different careers, to be experienced to different things,” Gatza said. “Until this happened, how many people knew there was a thing called Astrobiology? It’s important to get the kids excited about something and out of their books.”

The lesson plans and activities have included students building their own rovers. Working in teams, they selected the size and type of materials (made from dried pasta) based on their budget, then designed and built the rovers using an app on their Chromebooks.

“[They] had to pick a launch system, there was budget in this and everything has a cost,” the teacher said. “So they had to design their entire mission based on what they had a budget for. And then there were some funky things like they missed a launch date, the government cut their funding — the things that really happen.”

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