One Mars Year of Planet Four
Mars takes 687 day to complete one revolution in its orbit around the Sun, nearly twice as long as on Earth. We launched Planet Four on January 8, 2013 and today marks one full Mars year of Planet Four. Happy 1st Mars year birthday to Planet Four!
To celebrate and to thank you for all your contributions to Planet Four since launch, we’ve made a poster using all of your names*
The full poster can be downloaded here (it’s big – 22 MB download!), and a smaller resolution version (2 MB download) can be found here. You can find the original image used to make the poster here. It’s a subimage made by the HiRISE team from this newly released Inca City Season 5 image. We picked this image because of all the activity shown. Fans and blotches galore! Did you find your name?
Thanks for all your clicks over this Martian year. The science team is working hard on finishing the first paper based on your classifications. We’re almost there, and plan to submit in early 2015. We couldn’t do this without your time and effort.
Help celebrate Planet Four’s first Mars year anniversary by mapping fans and blotches in HiRISE images today at http://www.planetfour.org
*Names are only shown for volunteers who gave permission for us to show their name on the Zooniverse account settings. To update your settings login to https://www.zooniverse.org/account/settings and update the ‘name’ field.
Spring 5 in Inca City
The HiRISE camera right has been taking observations looking for activity on the Martian South Pole over the past few months as part of the new monitoring season (Season 5). In August, we partnered with the HiRISE team for a public vote to determine which polar region would have its first observation prepared for public release. The region dubbed ‘Inca City’ won. We have a big surprise. Not just one image, but all currently available observations this season of Inca City were publicly released by the HiRISE team. That’s right 5 brand new images of Inca City were recently released! You can find these images at:
- Spring in Inca City I
- Spring in Inca City II
- Spring in Inca City III
- Spring in Inca City IV
- Spring in Inca City V
(If you’re looking to make your computer more Planet Four-themed, each of the links above have versions of the images formatted to be computer desktop backgrounds.)
Today, we have a post by Planet Four Principal Investigator Candy Hansen telling tell you more about these observations:
It is southern spring again, and once again we are taking images of our favorite locations. We return to the same sites so that we can study processes from year-to-year. Do spring processes always play out similarly? Or do the occasional dust storms affect when fans appear and the pace of seasonal activities?
This location is known informally as Inca City. As citizens of Planet Four you already know that a seasonal polar cap composed of CO2 ice (dry ice) forms every winter. In the spring the ice sublimates from the top and the bottom of this layer of ice, and under the ice the trapped gas builds up pressure. Eventually a weak spot in the ice ruptures, and the gas escapes, carrying material from the surface with it. The material is deposited on the top surface of the ice, forming the fans and blotches that you have been measuring.
Inca City has distinctive ridges, one of which is shown at the top of this series of cutouts. The first cutout on the left was the first image to be taken after the sun rose, marking the end to polar night. We label time on Mars by “Ls”, which indicates the position of Mars in its orbit. Spring officially starts on Ls = 180, so at Ls = 174 there is very little sunlight. In spite of the small amount of sunlight seasonal activity has already started, and fans can be seen emerging from “spiders”, known formally as “araneiforms”.
These images have not been map-projected yet, so use the black arrow pointing at one of the spiders to orient the same locations from image to image. In the second image from the left, taken about 2 weeks later, you can see that the fan from that spider has become more prominent. In the araneiforms above so much dust has blown out that the individual fans seen in the leftmost image have begun to merge. The ridge is peppered with small spots where the seasonal ice has ruptured (blue arrow). Near the bottom of the second image there are new fans associated with boulders. Below that, at the bottom of the image, four new rupture sites have fans going in multiple directions.
The differences between the second and third images from the left are not substantial. That is because the time difference between the two is just 6 days, or “sols”. Fans on the ridge have lengthened just a bit, possibly due to fine material sliding downslope. In the fourth image from the left, taken at Ls = 191, the fans covering the araneiforms and on the ridge slope appear grey – are fine particles sinking into the ice? At the bottom of the image distinctive bright bluish fans are apparent.
Look at the boxed area in the 5th image and compare it to that same area in the 4th image, just below the indicated spider. The bland surface in the 4th image is now cracked. Polygonal cracks typically occur at this time in the spring. There are no easily-ruptured weak spots, so the pressure of the gas below the ice simply cracks the large plate of ice. The ice must have thinned to the point at which this pressure can break the ice sheet. Once it has cracked the gas escapes and new fans emerge, aligned along the cracks.
The ice has continued to thin by the time of the 6th image, and the araneiforms have likely defrosted entirely. More small fans emerge from cracks in the ice.
That’s not Mars!
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
The image above taken by HiRISE isn’t of the South Pole of Mars or any region on Mars for that matter. It’s an interloper from the Oort cloud (reservoir of the long period comets) coming in for a close encounter to Mars on its way into the inner Solar System for its closet approach to the Sun. This icy planetesimal originated in the Oort cloud and was perturbed onto an orbit that has slowly brought it into the inner Solar System and on a path that brings the comet close to Mars. So close in fact (87,000 miles away from Mars) that this is closer than any comet has come to Earth since the dawn of modern astronomy. This provided a rare opportunity to study this icy remnant of planet formation up close and personal with the flotilla of spacecraft orbiting Mars.
HiRISE, is the highest resolution camera sent to to the Red Planet, and the images you see on Planet Four come from it. HiRISE is designed to taken observations staring below at Mars. It’s a push broom camera so it’s using the motion of the spacecraft (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MRO) its aboard to create the image. To observe a comet requires a whole different way of observing using MRO to point and slew to target the comet. This was no easy feat but the HiRISE team accomplished it, taking images of the comet several days before and shortly before cloest encounter. During the closest part MRO was behind Mars to shield it and its instruments (including HiRISE) from the large amounts of dust entering the Martian atmosphere and could possibly damage or destroy the onboard instruments. This is likely the best optical image of Comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring, we’ll have. It may look blurry and span only a few pixels, but observations like this will significantly constrain the size of the nucleus. Congratulations to everyone involved for making these challenging observations successful.
This is the only the second comet imaged by HiRISE. HiRISE has tried this previously observing Comet ISON, a sun-grazing comet that broke up shortly before or during its encounter with the Sun. HiRISE imaged ISON’s nucleus and was able to put the best size constraints on the comet (better than the limits from the Hubble Space Telescope), that placed it around 1 km or smaller. With that size, ISON would be predicted not to survive matching the observations. The cool thing about both Siding Spring and ISON is that these comets were discovered with at least a year’s notice before their closest approach giving astronomers and planetary scientists time to apply for telescope time and mobilize resources (including spacecraft orbiting Mars!) to observe these elusive objects.
You can read more about these HiRISE observations here and here. If you’re interested in hearing more about observations like this get undertaken by HiRISE and the team behind the camera check out this Planet Four Live Chat where we had discussing the preparations for the Comet ISON imaging with Kristin Block and Christian Schaller. For a summary of all the Comet Siding Spring observations taken by the spacecraft orbiting Mars check out this blog by the Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla.
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