The arrival of multiple US and European planetary exploration missions at Mars (Squires et al., 2004a, 2004b; Clery, 2004) provided an opportunity to introduce students to geologic observation in general, and to planetary geology in particular, with all the excitement involved in “real-time” remote data acquisition from another planet. We took advantage of this opportunity by offering a freshman seminar in Mars Exploration timed to coincide with the arrivals of three planned landers in December 2003 and January 2004. The extended life of the NASA rover missions allowed us to hold this class again in 2005. While centering classroom discussion on the incoming observations, we also used the public proposal system of the Mars Orbital Camera (MOC) to teach principles of geologic observation to freshmen and sophomores in a small classroom setting. Science and non-science majors were guided towards an analytical view of the planet in which they attempted to ask critical scientific questions about the surface mor...