Before the Sunlight Leaves

A quick update on Planet Four: Terrains. I’m working on the first paper draft and planning on submitting it to a science journal by early February with any luck. Currently the draft is being iterated on; I’m incorporating comments and feedback from the rest of the science team. The paper focuses on the distribution of spider features on the South Pole based on Planet Four: Terrains assessments. So stay tuned for more on that over the coming months.

In the meantime, I’ve also processed the subject images currently retired from the newest set of images on the site. We’ve found  interesting areas with spiders and baby spiders that we’d like to get a closer look at. We’re hoping that HiRISE will image these over the coming months. The days on the South Pole are getting shorter. May 5th 2017 marks the official start of Southern Fall Equinox. In a few months time, we’ll have to wait approximately 2 Earth years for an opportunity to image interesting regions of the South Pole with HiRISE found by Planet Four: Terrains.

Processing the retired subjects from the current set of CTX images on the site, we found four new regions of interest thanks to your collaboration that we want to take a better look at. We  have requested HiRISE imaging. So the race is on to get through as many of the P4: Terrains subject images as we can before there won’t be enough sunlight for HiRISE observations. If you can spare some time, place help classify an image or two for spiders, baby spiders, channel networks, swiss cheese terrain, and craters on http://terrains.planetfour.org