New Images on Planet Four: Ridges
Thanks for everyone’s patience while we worked on getting new images on the Planet Four: Ridges website. The data is now live on the site. This set of images is the 2nd third of the new search region we’ve been focusing on. This search region includes two of the three remaining potential landing sites for the NASA’s next Mars rover, called Mars 2020. You can learn more about the region in this blog post. Dive in and search for polygonal ridges today on http://ridges.planetfour.org
Planet Four Progress
We wanted to give a quick update on Planet Four. Our main focus has been to get a data reduction pipeline that robustly clusters all the volunteer drawn markings of each subject image together to identify the seasonal fans and blotches and based on the majority shape select decide if the feature is a fan or a blotch. Michael Aye has been leading this effort. We’re pleased to say that that the main fan identification portion of the analysis pipeline is complete. We still have a few more things Michael has been working on for the blotch identification part. We think we’ve come up with a decent solution for identifying small and very large blotches. We hope to have this part of the analysis pipeline finalized soon. Then we will be able to apply the pipeline to all of your classifications and dive into what the shapes and sizes and directions of the fans and blotches tell us about the seasonal carbon dioxide jet process and the surface winds in the Martian South Polar region.
Normalized distribution of fan lengths based on volunteer markings from a specific HiRISE image – Image credit: Michael Aye and Anya Portyankina
An Update on All Things Mars
A quick update on all things Mars or at least all things Planet Four.
We got the referees’ reports back from the Planet Four: Terrains paper. The journal set it to two experts in the field. The read the paper and provided a critique of the paper. The reviewers gave positive feedback and have questions and concerns for us to address as well as other more minor requested changes to the manuscript. These additions and changes will improve the paper. So over the coming weeks, the science team will make modifications additions to the paper draft over the coming weeks and we hope to have it back in to the journal as soon as possible. Then our written response to the referees’ report and the updated manuscript will go back to the referees for their second look. We’ll keep you posted as we make more progress. In the meantime, there are new images we have uploaed on the Planet Four: Terrains website in need of review.
In regards to Planet Four: Ridges, thank to your help we’re completed 100 CTX images of our second search area. We’re currently working on getting new images onto the site. The CTX images are being processed as we speak and cut up into the subimages we need for the website. The images should hopefully be uploaded over the next week or so. Stay tuned to this space for more updates.
For Planet Four, we’re really at the stage of making the last changes and tweaks to the data analysis pipeline and switching gears to working on finishing the paper draft. We’ll have a separate blog post on that in the coming weeks.
Planet Four Blog 