More than 1,000 New Mexico fifth graders to simulate trip to Mars

  • Published
  • By Stephen Burke
  • Air Force Research Laboratory
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. --  More than 1,000 fifth grade students from 40 New Mexico schools will come together May 2 at the Albuquerque Convention Center to simulate going on a manned mission to Mars.

Mars Link-Up Day is the culminating event of the Air Force Research Laboratory La Luz Academy's Mars Missions Flight, a science, technology, engineering, and math  education outreach program for fifth grade students.

During the school year, students spend weeks studying the planet Mars. They created life support system models, mission patches and uniforms and completed other STEM-related tasks preparing for the mission.

At Link-Up Day, teams of students from different schools will join together to simulate visiting the Red Planet, building and linking-up colonies of habitats. Scientists and engineers from AFRL will be on hand to assist the students as they carry out their mission.

Simulated Mars missions such as this one could prove useful in the future. Several organizations are planning real-life manned trips to Mars within the next 15 years or so, including NASA, Mars One, SpaceX, and Inspiration Mars.

AFRL La Luz Academy, located on Kirtland Air Force Base, provides hands-on STEM education outreach programs for fifth through twelfth grade students from around New Mexico. This is the 20th consecutive year AFRL La Luz Academy has held a Mars Missions Flight Link-Up Day event--the first one was held in a Kirtland hangar in 1995.