From: "Eileen M. Bendixsen" <ebend@crow.cybercomm.net>
Subject: Q & A from Roberta Score
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 19:55:20 GMT
I am passing along another message from Roberta Score. Eileen Hi kids, Hmmm... I received this message the day before it was sent. ;-) Roberta Score, who was part of the team that discovered a meteorite in Antarctica, has written back to one of my Delmar students. I'll share her reply. Warm hugs, Patti Dear Stephanie Palmer, It is great to hear that that you LOVE science. It is really fun to be a scientist. Don't think that you aren't good at it. I was scared of science when I was your age. As I grew up I became more interested and was less shy about asking questions and my fear went away. That is how you learn, keep asking those questions. No question is dumb! Here are the answers to your questions: 1. Since you know there is life on Mars, do you know what they look like. We do NOT know that there is life on Mars. One group of scientist found something that think MAY be old life (nothing living now). BUT, they are not sure if their findings are true. It still could be something from earth. Scientists have a lot more work to do before they can say there once was life on Mars. The things that the scientists found are very, very, very small tubular objects that resemble earth-like bacteria. This does not mean that it is bacteria - more work needs to be done before we know for sure!! this work will take years. 2. How did you figure out there was life on Mars? The scientific process is to look at the rock on a microscopic level. The presence of certain minerals in the rock led the scientists to look at isotopes (ask Ms. Weeg to explain that term) which led them to use a super senitive microscope (scanning electron microscope) that looks at the make up of the rock on the level too small to see with the naked eye. robbie score