David Brand/News Service

Caroline elementary School students, from left, Tiffany Dean, Nick Dean and Vinessa Crispell, assemble their Red Rover Mars robot earlier this month.

Red Rover is just a playground game to most schoolchildren. But to fifth-graders at Caroline Elementary School in Ithaca, it is a name for serious scientific inquiry. Working with a Cornell astronomer who is the lead researcher on the Mars 2001 and 2003 missions, the class has designed a camera-carrying, motorized, miniature "Red Rover" robot to navigate the Martian-like terrain.

Caroline is one of the elementary schools across the nation chosen to participate in the design program. Teacher Tom Demmo's class at Caroline is using a Red Rover Lego Dacta model vehicle kit and special control software to design and operate a tele-robotic rover in a model terrain of Mars.

On Friday, April 30 at 8:30 a.m., Steven Squyres, professor of astronomy, will visit the classroom for a third time and watch the students as they test drive their model rover over a papier-m‰chŽ terrain they have built over the past six weeks.

The Red Rover kit was designed by the Planetary Society, an organization co-founded in 1980 by the late Carl Sagan. Back in 1980, Squyres was one of Sagan's graduate students. Today, the Planetary Society has 100,000 members in more than 100 countries, and Squyres is an internationally renowned astronomer who chairs the NASA advisory committee on space science. He is also the leader of the NASA team that is designing a suite of four instruments to be carried aboard NASA's Mars Surveyor 2001 lander, which will be a prelude to the Athena Mars rover; that rover will land on the planet in 2003 to extract samples of rock and soil for return to Earth.

The Caroline children have been fortunate to get a first-hand briefing on the Mars missions from Squyres. "The (2001) mission will involve conducting a series of sophisticated experiments on the Red Planet to pave the way for our rover to roam the planet in 2003 and for humans to visit the planet someday," says Squyres, who is in regular e-mail contact with Demmo and his students whenever they need the advice of an expert.

Demmo, a veteran teacher of 25 years, divided his class of 23 students into various working groups to work on the building project. One group, the design engineers, has had to build the four-wheeled roving robot so it can carry the billiard ball-sized QuickCam video camera without toppling as the rover probes and swerves around the rough model Martian landscape.

Another group researched, designed and built the papier-m‰chŽ Martian terrain with rocks, crevasses, canyons, volcanoes, channels and impact craters through which the Red Rover robot must navigate.

In addition, three sets of two drivers each have been training to control the rover from their computer, which involves navigating the robot through a three-dimensional world with the only information supplied by the two-dimensional computer screen, receiving video images from the rover's camera. The drivers also have to estimate distance and turning angles, and to adjust power levels and time durations. Yet another group is serving as mission planners, plotting the trajectory that the rover will follow through its terrain.

"It has been gratifying to see how the students, who have a diverse range of abilities, analyze their problems and come to the realization that they can devise and implement solutions to those problems, in much the way that the NASA engineers are doing," says Demmo, whose class has been devoting three class periods a week to the project, researching on-line and in the library, designing, building and rebuilding.

In weeks to come, the Caroline students will go on-line with other participating schools that have built Red Rovers. Then the children will attempt navigate each others' robots remotely over the Martian terrain that each school has devised.