Image Credit: catbeurnier– Flickr – original photo

January 8th, marked the 4th anniversary (well at least in Earth years!) of the launch of  the one and only original Planet Four. We wanted to thank you for being on this journey with us for the past four Earth years. Our first science paper seems to always be delayed, but I and the rest of the science team are dedicated to getting this paper out the door. The science team is virtually meeting on Wednesday to discuss what I hope is the freezing of the development of the classification clustering algorithm. That’s the hurdle in our way, and over the past Earth year Michael has made great strides dealing with the major issues we needed to tackle to get the science from your clicks. Thank you for your time and effort on the site. We still need you, and new data from Manhattan Season 5 is now live on the site. So go check it out and classify some fans and blotches at http://www.planetfour.org.

Planet Four has been able to show that a citizen science approach beyond crater identification with Mars orbital imagery works. The science team was invited this past fall to showcase Planet Four at a workshop focused on citizen participation in Mars exploration hosted by NASA Headquarters. Planet Four’s successes, has spawned other Mars Zooniverse citizen science projects: Planet Four: Terrains (which has already produced results with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter pointing HiRISE and new locations on the Martian South Pole) and a  birthday gift if you like that is coming tomorrow! Stay tuned to this space for more tomorrow! We can’t wait to share this new endeavor with you all.

Thank you for the past four years and onward to Year 5!

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!

Image credit: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_020716_0945 NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Thanks to your help, we’re nearly through all the Season 1 images of the regions informally nicknamed ‘Giza’ and ‘Ithaca’ on Planet Four. It means we’ll be moving on to another region of the south pole to complete its Season 1 observations. We’ve selected a region that has no internal nickname that we refer to it by. It has been captioned previously in public releases as ‘Possible Geyser Activity’ or ‘Geysers have been putatively spotted here.’ That’s quite a mouthful, and we use the informal names to talk about the region in blog posts and in discussions among the science team and on Talk.  The previous nicknames we’ve used are ones inherited from the HiIRSE seasonal monitoring campaign, but here’s your chance to give input. Members of the Planet Four and  Zooniverse teams have come up with nickname  suggestions which you get to vote on (see below).  Note – These names are all unofficial and not formal International Astronomical Union approved names for those regions on Mars. They’re informal and help us with the record keeping.

The site is located at -85.4  degrees N Latitude and 103.9 degrees East Longitude.  You can get a sense of the area with this full frame HiRISE image. As most of the South Pole monitoring campaign nicknames are towns or cities or parts of cities on the Earth, we have decided to continue that theme for this region. Here’s the informal nicknames options you can vote for:

**Note** – This vote is to help select the  nickname for a region on the south pole of Mars.  This is unofficial and not  a formal International Astronomical Union approved naming process for this region on Mars. The name is informal and helps us with the record keeping only.