Remote Sensing: Activity – Science S1

5 min. Introduction
10 min. Questions
15 min. Introduce Challenge
10 min. Explore Data
10 min. Reflect

55 min. Total

The Educator Guide has a script, materials list, and prep directions. Be sure to have it open and ready to help guide you through every activity.

• Read through the entire PLANETS Science Series guide.
• Print or copy Science Notebooks, one for each youth.
• Print or copy, and staple Data Packets, Landforms Glossary, and Mineral Data Sheets, in the guide (color if possible), one for each group.
• Print or copy Landing Ellipses and cut out for each group.

Introduces youth to the idea that NASA scientists are interested in finding evidence of past water on Mars that would indicate habitability. Challenges youth to select one of four landing sites for a rover by examining high resolution images of landforms on Mars.

• The Viking, HiRISE, and CTX images are at different scales. The ellipses are to be traced on the CTX (1 0 km scale bar) images only.
• If your Data packet prints out small, your landing ellipses will be too big. Have your students draw their own with pencil.

Science Snippet: Build your content knowledge to help answer youth's questions.

We can identify landforms in remotely sensed images of Mars that might indicate evidence of past water.

Today we investigated remotely sensed images to find landforms on Mars that indicate water. These reveal evidence that Mars once had water on its surface.