Advice for Mars Exploration Presentations

Don’t spend time on NASA’s broad goals for Mars Exploration.

Don’t go overboard on technical jargon. You are not an expert on remote sensing instrumentation. I would rather you say something like “the spacecraft has 2 different types of spectrometers. I don’t really understand how they all work, but the basic idea is that together they will map the chemical composition of the surface”  than to say “the spacecraft has a Nicolet Nexus 670 spectrometer with a CsI beamsplitter and an uncooled deuterated triglycine sulfate (DTGS) detector which operates in the  range from 2000 — 220 cm-1”.

Do look for key science discoveries and highlights of the mission.

Do work together on the presentation. Everyone should contribute to all parts in some way, and each person in the group should be capable of giving the entire presentation on their own. The worst thing to do is to have each person work totally independently, arrive at class with three separate powerpoints, have duplicate or repeated information, and in general demonstrate that aside from assigning parts, the group never communicated about the presentation. (Actually, it is possible to do worse; imagine having a group member show up with their segment of the presentation on the wrong mission!)

Do include images.