Tuesday, December 1, 2009

“Mars as the Abode of Life”

On Wednesday 18th November, we went to the HK Science Museum to attend a lecture from Anu Ojh a scientist from the British space Agency who has been involved with NASSA and their missions to Mars. The information he talked about was fascinating!

We found out that, the distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,000 km, and if you times that distance by 10, you get to distance from earth to Mars. It would take 7 months for a shuttle to get to Mars!

This lecture wasn’t all talking though; it was full of fun experiments. One of our favourite experiments was and experiment showing you how big you would be if you where to be in Mars’ atmosphere right now. We were all given syringes and a marshmallow and then we placed the marshmallow inside the syringe. Placing our finger over the hole of the syringe, we pull the syringe out. This acted like a vacuum and the marshmallow swelled up to 3 times it size. So we found out that we would swell up to 3 times OUR size when being in Mars’ atmosphere.

Another fascinating experiment was when he boiled water to just under its boiling point and placed it in a vacuum. When water reaches 100 ºC, it starts boiling and evaporates. This water was below 100 ºC but when he placed the water in the vacuum, the water started to boil and evaporated very quickly. This is an example of what would happen to water on mars, and why Mars has no water on its surface. We found out that the boiling point of water on Mars is 37 ºC. This is also the same temperature of our bodys. This meant, that when we entered Mars’ atmosphere, we wouldn’t just swell up, but the water inside our cells would boil, and we would die a very painful death in about 30 seconds.

Another fascinating thing about Mars is that there are sedimentary rocks on the planet. This is odd because Mars doesn’t have any water to form sedimentary rocks. There are sedimentary rocks on Mars because there used to be water on Mars, but the atmosphere started to become so thin that the water evaporated. Scientists figured out that Mars had lost its magnetic field, which then caused the Martian atmosphere to become thin.

As you probably know, there is a program on computers called “Google Earth.” Well, its no just Earth, but if you click on the icon near the top middle/right, you can change the planet into Mars! Now, you can look around mars. Mount Everest is the biggest mountain on Earth, but on Mars, there is a volcano that is even bigger than that. It is called Olympus Mons, and is it 27 km high and 550 km wide!

Finally, in about 25 years from now, people out age now will be sent to Mars. This is the only way we can actually find enough out about Mars. It is possible that scientists will be able to alter Mars through the process of terraforming so that life there will be more like Earth.

Overall, this was an excellent trip and we learnt so much from it!



Alisdair Yr 8