Instructor: Dr. Michael Ramsey Office: SRCC, room 509/511 Office Phone: 624-8772 Email: ramsey@ivis.eps.pitt.edu Office Hours: M, 10:00 - 12:00am (or by appointment)

1. Objective: This course will focus on the theory, technology and science of the recent and upcoming remote sensing data sets of Mars. NASA's current Mars Exploration Program has the overarching goal of collecting surface and atmospheric data in order to better understand where water was and may still be on the planet. This has led to numerous missions from rovers to orbiters that contain remote sensing data sets that span the electromagnetic spectrum. These data have already led to several important discoveries of the geologic and atmospheric processes on the planet, and will be the focus of this graduate-level, seminar-style class.

2. Lecture Time: Tu from 9:30pm - 11:50pm in SRCC 501. Attendance is strongly encouraged at all scheduled class meetings since this is a graduate-level, seminar participation style class.

3. Textbook: "Mars: The NASA Mission Reports", by Robert Godwin (Apogee Books, 2000, ISBN: 1-896522-62-9).

4. Course Requirements: The goal of this course is to foster academic discussion on the past, present, and future instruments, data, and science results returned from the Red Planet. As such class participation and mastery of the journal papers will constitute the final grade. In addition, there will be opportunity to work with current Mars data in the IVIS Planetary laboratory and, if time and data allow, the preparation of manuscript to be submitted to a planetary journal.

• Project: The final project will constitute a group effort from the class with each student appearing as a co-author on a possible final paper. The successful completion of this research project will entail working together as a group to: (a) thoroughly understand the research literature, (b) identify a potential science question using remote sensing data, (c) devise a work plan for analyzing those data sets, (d) presentation of an hour-long research talk, and (e) preparation of the final outline, manuscript and figures.

5. Course Web Site: This site contains the syllabus, announcements and assigned reference list for the class. Please check here for the most current class information.

• Web site: http://ivis.eps.pitt.edu/courses/mars/
• Weekly Schedule: http://ivis.eps.pitt.edu/courses/mars/schedule.html
• Bibliography (last update: Thursday, 10-Nov-2005 21:08:35 EST)
• Online Remote Sensing Tutorial

6. Mars Web Sites:

• Interactive Mars Data Maps: http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/globalData/
• NASA's Science Mission Directorate: http://science.hq.nasa.gov/
• The Center for Mars Exploration: http://cmex-www.arc.nasa.gov/CMEX/
• Mars Exploration Program: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/
• NASA's Astrobiology Program: http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/
• NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
• 6th Int'l Conference on Mars: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/sixthmars2003/