THE BENEFITS OF VIRTUAL LEARNING AND ITS ABILITY TO EXPAND HORIZONS BEYOND THE EARTH: THE MARS 2020 EXAMPLE

Short, informative videos about planetary exploration can improve undergraduate geoscience education, making students more interested to learn. This presentation focuses on a video about the Mars 2020 mission, scheduled to land in mid-Feb. 2021. Mars 2020 is the ninth NASA lander mission to Mars, and its scientific objectives provide especially good opportunities for natural science education because it is timely and exciting. The Martian rover Perseverance, accompanied by the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, will study Jezero Crater. Jezero Crater, which lies along the boundary between the ancient Martian highlands, which dominates the southern hemisphere, and the younger Martian lowlands, which lie to the north. This 28-mile- wide impact crater is thought to have been formed by a meteorite impact about 3.5 billion years ago when Mars still had liquid water on its surface. Jezero Crater became a lake with a delta fed by a river from the Martian highlands. Microbial life could have developed in this lake, and fossil evidence might be preserved in sediments of Jezero cater. Orbital imagery reveals spectral signatures consistent with carbonate rocks, which might be carbonates, which often contain fossils on Earth. Another exciting aspect is that Mars 2020 is the first of three missions designed to collect and return Mars samples to Earth for more detailed studies than can be accomplished by a rover, for example, determining radiometric ages. We are creating a video to highlight Jezero Crater's geology, and an early draft of the video may be shown. The video's emphasis will be placed on using modern and ancient Earth deltas as analogues for the Jezero Crater delta. These comparisons can help students gain insight into Mars's geological processes, engage more deeply with this mission, and become more interested in the Earth processes and those of other planets.