THEMIS Science Fair Projects

Kyle
Grade 8

Objectives/Goals

The objectve was to ground-truth THEMIS an infrared spectrometer on the Mars orbiter Odyssey. To see if you could find out the size and composition of rocks using thermal inertia.

Methods/Materials

I choose 12 different kinds of rocks for the study. I then took 10 readings with a infrared thermomiter for each rock in the field. Then I took on bag home of each kind of rock to test the thermal inertia. I then put a little bit of each kind of rock in a plastic contanier a put it in the freezer over night. The next morning I took the rocks out and took five readings of each rock every 15 minutes to deturmine the thermal inertia. I then repeated that exparament for an oven to test the thermal inertia of the cooling down of rocks.

Results

The size had a major part in determining the thermal inertia. The smaller the rock the the less thermal inertia it had. compositon also made a little bit of difference.

Conclusions/Discussion

On the basis of my results i found out that THEMIS is trust worthy, But THEMIS was looking at bigger ranges of the sizes of rocks. original abstract: http://www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/2004/Projects/J0614.pdf