The latest set of Planet Four: Terrains images comes with some added bonus features on Talk. Thanks to upgrades in the Zooniverse platform we can now display additional information with the metadata icon on Talk that won’t appear in the classification interface. So we can share the original parent CTX image name and a link to the image on Talk for your further investigations. We don’t show this information in the classification interface in order to keep the classifications free from any potential causes of bias.

So now when you classify, if you want to check out the full frame CTX image the subject is derived from, just click on the ‘Talk’ button after submitting your classification. This will bring you to the Talk Subject Page for this subject. Then if you click on the ‘i’ icon below the image,the metadata window will pop up (see below)

!filename is the internal filename the Planet Four: Terrains used to name the subject when we generated it. !CTX_filename is the name of the full frame CTX image the subject comes from. !Public_CTX_link will take you to the MRO Context Camera Image Explorer where you can view the image (the link was working earlier to directly show the CTX image but isn’t working for me at the moment. If  you have any issues you can always copy and paste the CTX filename into the search box and that will bring up the image)

Brand new images are now available on Planet Four: Terrains. Thanks to your help we finished all the live data on the site earlier this week. We have now uploaded new data, and we’re now expanding out to further distances away from the south pole to explore the frequency of spiders, baby spider, channel networks, swiss cheese terrain, and boulders.

These observations span latitudes of -70 to -90 N degrees as shown in the figure below. The red shows the outlines of the new CTX images loaded and ready on Planet Four: Terrains, the white is the original set on the site at launch, and the green areas are the locations/images reviewed on the site over the past several months. The new dataset is the only one so far on Planet Four: Terrains  that explores the -70 to -75 N degree latitude ring about the Martian south pole.

The science team is working on the first paper from the project based on the white set of images classified  (see above) on the site, and new regions of interest are scheduled to be imaged in higher resolution detail with the HiRISE camera. With more of the south pole surveyed with the classifications Planet Four: Terrains, who knows what we’ll find! Classify an image or two at http://terrains.planetfour.org

Inspired by the images of Swiss Cheese Terrain like these examples below shown on Planet Four: Terrains,  volunteer Albert Laubi (xflyer) made some visually stunning paintings using acrylic, oil, sand on canvas)and shared them on Talk.

Swiss Cheese Terrain Examples on Planet Four: Terrains

Here’s some words  from Albert:

(Great) Natures forms seen through (excited) human eyes.
Stunned by the variety of shapings that emerge on Mars’ south pole and impressed by the brilliant achievements of scientists, which enables us to make visible things like that even on a far away planet, I got the idea to combine this into a series of pieces containing kinda triple artwork: nature, science and (my) personal perception.

Technically I arranged in Photoshop some parts of similar b/w Mars terrain pictures to a composition, extracted chosen areas for colorizing and texturizing, then put this different layers through all paces, till I had a balance, where I could say: Yeah, let’s paint it! The original size of each painting is 50cm x 50cm.

Check out Albert’s pieces below:

Marsic Chromorph I-VI Image Credit:  Albert Laubi

Thank you Albert for sharing your work. If you have any Planet Four or Planet Four: Terrains inspired artwork or poetry, we’d love to share it. Post a link to your work in Planet Four Talk or Planet Four: Terrains Talk