Goldilocks and the Three Planets

Just after their formation, the atmospheres of Venus, Earth, and Mars are though to have been very similar. Why are they so different today? We are developing a series of presentations that investigates the differences in the atmospheres of Venus, Earth, and Mars, and how these differences arose. These presentations are a combination of planetary images displayed on engaging spherical displays and visual demonstrations. We recently tested and evaluated our first presentation on the Lawrence Hall of Science's six-foot diameter Science on a Sphere. We will briefly summarize this presentation and the evaluation results. The target audience for this initial presentation is elementary school age children. Future presentations will target middle school and high school age students focusing on planetary magnetic fields and the role they play in atmospheric evolution. Our future plans include transferring these presentations onto a portable, table top spherical display system to take into classrooms. Finally, we are also building rigid, three-dimensional wire models of the magnetic fields and Venus, Earth, and Mars for use in the traveling presentations. We will tie the development and debut of these presentations to appropriate topics throughout the Year of the Solar System.