Students participate in out of this world experience

Freedom Newspapers: Sharna Johnson Hagerman Elementary School fifth-grader Uriel Cepeda uses duct tape to patch a leak in his team’s colony habitat during the Starbase La Luz Metamaterial Research Mission Link-up Day at Cannon Air Force Base.

Equipped with huge sheets of plastic, silver rolls of duct tape and box fans, hundreds of area school children worked together to construct human habitats on Mars.

Once they were finished, Cannon Air Force Base’s Hangar 109 was transformed into a Martian colony. More than 280 fifth-graders from five elementary schools recently participated in the Starbase La Luz Mars Mission Flight Link-up Day 2007.

According to an Air Force news release, Starbase La Luz is an education outreach program sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

“The overall goal is to get kids interested in space, engineering and science,” said Lt. Benjamin Sears, who served as Cannon’s point of contact at the event.

Hagerman Elementary School student Ruth Ann Stephens said her class spent months preparing for the event. “We spent half the year working on little projects,” Stephens said.

The freckle-faced 11-year-old said she was assigned to the creativity team. She and her classmates developed a treadmill-powered television. “One person would run while someone played a video game,” Stephens said.

Frankie Trujillo, a fifth-grader at Zia Elementary School, said he was in charge of developing a system to supply air to the colony. Trujillo’s plan included a dome, heat lights and plants. “The plants would create oxygen so we could breathe,” Trujillo said.

Other students worked on water supply, waste management and temperature control. The students also underwent a uniform inspection and sang a ballad about their Mars experience.

“It was a lot of hard work,” Trujillo said, “but we had fun.”