Planet Four: Terrains is back from hiatus. We’ve come up with a new set of images to search on the site. These CTX images will continue our trend of searching further northward and covering gaps in our coverage.

The figure above shows the newly uploaded CTX images on the geologic map of the Martian south polar region. The blue is the south polar layered deposits (SPLD). This is where most of the spiders are located, but we’ve already learned through Planet Four: Terrains that there are spiders also outside the SPLD, so that’s why the search region expands well beyond the SPD. The red rectangles show you the CTX images that we’ve currently uploaded to the site. The bright green rectangles are the second half of the dataset.

Our current plan is to write a summary science paper with a final catalog from the spider search over the past several years, after we get through both sets of CTX images. We’ll look at the soil thermal inertia and other properties and see if we find a links or correlations to where spiders are visible. We think this we’ll wrap up this phase of Planet Four: Terrains, but we already have some ideas where we might take the project next.

Thanks for your help! Dive in today at http://terrains.planetfour.org!