Golf Ball Activity to Assist Students in Understanding How TES Works

Mary Martin
Kiva Elementary School
Scottsdale School District

Objectives:

This is a rather simple activity designed to help students at the intermediate level understand the concept of how scientists are able to determine the composition of the surface of Mars without ever touching it.

Materials:

A golf or ping pong ball. (Actually any small ball will do). A collection of surfaces on which the ball will be bounced. Examples should include: the table surface; some hard surfaces like glass, plastic, metal; a Styrofoam block; a rock; a dry sponge; a block of wood; some softer surfaces like a computer mouse pad, sand, a wet sponge, a piece of folded cloth, cardboard. A meter stick or yard stick, to use to keep the height of the dropped ball even.

Procedure:

Basically you are going to drop the ball on the different surfaces from a standard height and observe the return bounce.

Concept:

The return bounce of the ball varies with the different surfaces. Discussion should lead students to understand that you could carefully measure, record, and catalog the exact height of the return bounce. This could be done for every material known on Earth. (Yes, it would be tedious and take some time, but it could be done and the information stored in a database like fingerprints or bits of DNA can be stored for exact identification of people. And now we would have a way of identifying surface substances just by dropping a golf ball on them.) This infrared "fingerprint" has been done for the minerals of the Earth.

No, we won't be dropping golf balls on Mars! But the incoming energy of the golf ball can be related to the incoming energy of the Sun's light. The rebounding energy (the height of the bounce) of the golf ball can be related to the infrared radiation which is received, precisely measured, and recorded by the thermal emission spectrometer (TES). Now since this infrared radiation can be compared with the massive amount of data recorded for the known minerals of the Earth, we can have computers rapidly determine just which mineral it is, similar to identifying a criminal by his/her fingerprints. From this we can determine which minerals are to be found on the Martian surface.