Mission to Mars Student Activity #4
One Small Step

You are now at the final stage of your preparation to be a mission specialist in determining a landing site for a future mission to Mars. You have had an opportunity to look at how much more information about the surface can be gathered with more sophisticated techniques. Your probes of your simulated surface gave you much more information than you had available to you in the first activity, yet there were still surface details you were unable to distinguish. In the third activity, you have images and measurements, and so you were able to make accurate and detailed reproductions of the surface. Now, you have the task of determining where on the entire Planet you would recommend that a manned mission land. Remember the criteria your class developed at the beginning of this module? You will want to apply them here. You also will have to decide what is the purpose of this mission. It is important to keep in mind that in Activity #3, the data you had available to construct your model was 1 pixel in size. The images that you will have available to you on the Mars atlas link have many pixels that combine together to give you the total picture. Although surface imaging is available only for Viking 1 and Viking 2 at this time, you can still apply your knowledge and decide on what you think might be the best site that meets your criteria:

Click here to see the Mars atlas

Your will present your recommendation at a Landing Site Fair. You and your group will prepare a large poster that shows the following:

• the location of your site on Mars using a picture of the entire planet
• a downloaded picture, preferably in color, of your proposed site
• a drawing showing what you think this site might look like if you were standing on the surface of it rather than looking at it from orbit
• a short paragraph explaining what are the criteria for a landing site, what is your proposed mission, and why did you choose this site.