Students Get Close Look At Mars Rock

A piece of rock students passed around last week is a resident alien of sorts; it’s originally from Mars.

The chip is part of a collection of space artifacts that NASA enthusiast Joe Bruce displays often at area schools. A local business owner, Bruce presents a slide show in which he tells students about the history of the U.S. space program. Afterward, he passes around each artifact.

He visited Hutton and Adams elementaries on Friday. Bruce’s mission, he said, is to keep kids excited about math and science.

“We lose so many kids who fall away from an interest in science,” he said. “If I can keep them motivated a little bit longer, who knows what some of them might accomplish.”

The chip’s story certainly mesmerized children, Adams Teacher Cheryl Aleman said. Students looked at it through two clear containers, one inside the other to protect the rare rock.

Bruce told them that the sliver of Mars came from a meteorite that smacked into Africa in 1962. That meteorite was launched into space in the last billion or so years after something big slammed into the base of a Mars volcano.

The force hurtled debris, including the earthbound meteorite, out of the weak Mars atmosphere.

How does he know all this? “Science!” he told the class.

Bruce said that he’s had the chip analyzed by scientists, who were able to determine from embedded crystals not only that the chip was from Mars, but even the specific location on Mars - a crater at the base of the mighty volcano Ceranus Thouls.

He passed around a picture of the place to students. “It just makes the story that much more real to them,” he said.

Other artifacts Bruce brought included a 1950s-era test pilot space suit, a black space shuttle tile and a space shuttle nose wheel that he got from an airplane spare parts dealer in Florida.