Plane Four: Craters

Welcome to Planet Four: Craters!

Recently, a new version of the Planet Four project went live, and we are asking you to mark craters on the surface of Mars.

By counting the craters we will be able to figure out how old various geological surfaces are! This will be a big help for missions such as the 2016 NASA InSight experiment, which will use geophysical techniques such as seismology and heat flow to figure out how Mars has evolved. Knowing the age of the surface will help us to put a time-scale on that evolution.

Another aim of the project is to help improve the design of future Zooniverse sites.

When marking craters on Mars using this new version of Planet Four, you will be using one of three different classification interfaces. They each have different tools for you to use (on the left hand side of the page), and will ask you to complete tasks in differing orders for each image. Don’t worry! When you use one of these interfaces for the first time a tutorial will guide you through how to use it, in the same way the original Planet Four site did.

The reason for the different interfaces is that we want to know which one works the best, the one that you enjoy using the most and find the easiest to use, and gives the best crater marking results.

To find this out, we would really value your feedback. If you have a spare 15 minutes, there is a questionnaire on the Talk page (accessed through clicking the discuss button on the classify page) where you can answer questions and give your opinions about using the interfaces.

The information you give us will then be used to help design future versions of Planet Four, and other Zooniverse projects – so your opinions really count!

Get involved now at craters.planetfour.org

Happy crater marking!

James