5 Million Classifications

Today we have a post by Dr. Candice (Candy) Hansen, principal investigator (PI) of Planet Four and Planet Four: Terrains. Dr. Hansen also serves as the Deputy Principal Investigator for HiRISE (the camera providing the images of spiders, fans, and blotches seen on the site). She is also a Co-Investigator on the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph on the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Additionally she is a  member of the science team for the Juno mission to Jupiter. Dr. Hansen is responsible for the development and operation of  JunoCam, an outreach camera that will involve the public in planning images of Jupiter.

Five MILLION Planet Four classifications!  We have 4 people on our P4 science team – I cannot even begin to calculate how long it would have taken us to do the work that you, our fabulous volunteers, have done.  Because of your contributions we are analyzing all this data, getting results, rather than still doing the measurements on individual HiRISE images.

Just the other day one of my colleagues and I were discussing our early efforts to automate the identification and sizing of fans.  We were at the time perplexed by how to train the code to recognize the same fan when the contrast had changed, recognizing that fans could come from the same source yet point in different directions, what to do when a hazy atmosphere lowered the contrast of all the fans in the scene and so on.  The human eye-brain connection is so incredibly powerful that we overcome these challenges without even realizing that we have faced a puzzle!

And in the process of helping us I have also realized that you have built a community.  We all are now members of the P4 science team.  With that in mind I’d like to acknowledge the wonderful contributions of our moderators, and how the interplay between Meg, the moderators, and all of the rest of us has lent a joyful note to the whole undertaking.  To the Talk community and all Planet Four volunteers , you might have been alone when we passed the 5 million mark, but all of us are celebrating together around the world!