Introducing Planet Four: Terrains
Dear Martian Citizen Scientists!
We are excited to introduce to you a new companion citizen science project to Planet Four called “Planet Four: Terrains” built on the Zooniverse’s new platform. You have explored with us here in Planet Four some of the most detailed surface observations ever made in our solar system and many of you have acknowledged and wondered about all the other amazing features visible in these images that we did not ask to be studied, like spiders, networks of channels and weirdly looking craters. (some of you will remember that one of these even led to a re-observation of the same crater with the HiRISE camera).
HiRISE imaged spiders Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
It is an interesting fact that when one decides to make a camera that can resolve a lot of small details, that it will not be able to scan a lot of area. One has to decide, as long as we don’t have infinite data transport capabilities and infinite mission time at other planets and moons in the solar system. That’s why the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the spacecraft that houses the HiRISE camera that produced all the images in the Planet Four project has a complementary camera system onboard to provide context, appropriately called CTX for ConTeXt camera. It has a lower resolution than HiRISE (approx 5-6 m compared to HiRISE’s 25 to 50 cm) but takes images from a far larger region than HiRISE.
CTX image – Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science System
So here is our idea: We confirmed that many of the features you were asking about are still recognizable with the lower resolution images of CTX. Therefore we would like your help in gathering spatial statistics in where around the south pole we can find which kind of patterns on the ground that are related to CO2 ice activities. Your help in classifying CTX data into a set of ground patterns will serve to decide where the HiRISE camera will be pointed next during 2016’s south polar spring season observation campaign. This way your contributions directly improve the scientific output of both CTX and the HiRISE camera and we are very excited to provide to you a way to point the highest resolution camera in the solar system to the most interesting areas of the Martian south pole!
You can find the new project, a more detailed science case description and an awesome spotter’s guide at this address: http://terrains.planetfour.org
Thanks as always for your time and your enthusiasm!
Michael
Goodbye Manhattan, Welcome Back to Ithaca
We’ve been focusing on Manhattan for the past few months, with the aim to finish Season 4 and any remaining images of areas surrounding Manhattan in Season 1. We’ve made a big push in the last few months to finish Manhattan, and thanks to your help, we’ve completed all publicly released seasons of Manhattan.
With four seasons of Manhattan to add to the four seasons of Inca City that you’ve helped classify, we now have a rich dataset to start looking at how geyser formation evolves over time and how the process of fans and blotch changes from Mars year to Mars year.
Planet Four is leaving Manhattan for now, but we’ll be back for Season 5 some time in the future. We’re going back to focus on another target of interest, Ithaca. We started classifying Ithaca Season 1 images last year, and they’re now back on the site for your to map fans and blotches. You can learn more about Ithaca here. The most telling difference between Ithaca and other areas on Mars’ south pole is the giant fans.
Dive into Ithaca today at http://www.planetfour.org
Goodbye Inca City, Onward to Manhattan
Thanks to your help, the Inca City images we’ve been showing on the site for the past several months are complete, and we’re now back in the region known as Manhattan. We’ve been to Manhattan before, but that was during a different Martian year. HiRISE has been in orbit around Mars for almost 10 Earth years which equates to roughly 5 Martian years. We’re showing new never-before-seen images on the Planet Four website right now. These observations are taken from HiRISE’s 4th Martian spring imaging the development of the windblown fans.
By examining the same region over and over again during different Spring seasons, we can study how this process of forming fans and geysers is evolving over time and how properties like topography, thermal inertia of the soil, presence of different types of spider channels, and changes in the Martian atmosphere impact the properties of the seasonal ice sheet and thus the formation and evolution of the seasonal fans (and by proxy the geysers that form them). In addition, the fan directions and lengths, as well as the presence of blotches, are an excellent probe of wind direction and strength throughout the Martian Spring. With your classification we will be able to see if the winds repeat the same each season or change direction.
For the rest of the South Pole we only have observations from Season 2 and Season 3 classified. With the completion of the previous set of Inca City images, we now have four seasons of fan formation mapping in Inca City. The extra two seasons doubles the temporal baseline we have on Inca City to look for changes and evolution in the fan formation process. The classifications you make now will help us have the same kind of dataset for Manhattan. Having fan and blotch maps for two regions with different topography and locations on the Martian South Pole will help us tease out which effects are due to local conditions and which ones are due to to the changes in the Martian climate (like more dust in the ice sheet).
Help classify the new images of Manhattan at http://www.planetfour.org
PS. If you haven’t tried out Planet Four: Craters, do take a look and classify an image or two. Your classifications and feedback will help improve the design of future Zooniverse projects.
Plane Four: Craters
Welcome to Planet Four: Craters!
Recently, a new version of the Planet Four project went live, and we are asking you to mark craters on the surface of Mars.
By counting the craters we will be able to figure out how old various geological surfaces are! This will be a big help for missions such as the 2016 NASA InSight experiment, which will use geophysical techniques such as seismology and heat flow to figure out how Mars has evolved. Knowing the age of the surface will help us to put a time-scale on that evolution.
Another aim of the project is to help improve the design of future Zooniverse sites.
When marking craters on Mars using this new version of Planet Four, you will be using one of three different classification interfaces. They each have different tools for you to use (on the left hand side of the page), and will ask you to complete tasks in differing orders for each image. Don’t worry! When you use one of these interfaces for the first time a tutorial will guide you through how to use it, in the same way the original Planet Four site did.
The reason for the different interfaces is that we want to know which one works the best, the one that you enjoy using the most and find the easiest to use, and gives the best crater marking results.
To find this out, we would really value your feedback. If you have a spare 15 minutes, there is a questionnaire on the Talk page (accessed through clicking the discuss button on the classify page) where you can answer questions and give your opinions about using the interfaces.
The information you give us will then be used to help design future versions of Planet Four, and other Zooniverse projects – so your opinions really count!
Get involved now at craters.planetfour.org
Happy crater marking!
James
Clustering the PlanetFour results
Our beloved PlanetFour citizen scientists have created a wealth of data that we are currently digging through. Each PlanetFour image tile is currently being retired after 30 randomly selected citizens pressed the ‘Submit’ button on it. Now, we obviously have to create software to analyze the millions of responses we have collected from the citizen scientists, and sometimes objects in the image are close to each other, just like in the lower right corner of Figure 1.
Figure 1: Original HiRISE cutout tile that is being shown to 30 random PlanetFour citizen scientists.
And, naturally, everybody’s response to what can be seen in this HiRISE image is slightly different, but fret not: this is what we want! Because the “wisdom of the crowd effect” entails that the mean value of many answers are very very close to the real answer. See Figure 2 below for an example of the markings we have received.
Figure 2: Original markings of P4 Citizen scientists.
Note the amount of markings in the lower right, covering both individual fans that are visible in Figure 1. It is understandable that the software analyzing these markings needs to be able to distinguish what a marking was for, what visual object in the image was meant to be marked by the individual Citizen scientists. And I admit, looking at this kind of overwhelming data, I was a bit skeptical that it can be done. Which would still be fine, because one of our main goals is wind directions to be determined and as long as every subframe results in the indication of a wind direction, we have learned A LOT! But if we can disentangle these markings to show us individual fans, we could even learn more: We can count the amount of activity per image more precisely, to learn how ‘active’ this area is. And we even can learn about changes of wind direction happening, if at the same source of activity two different wind directions can be distinguished. For that, we need to be able to separate these markings as good as possible.
And we are very glad to tell you that that indeed seems possible, using modern data analysis techniques called “clustering” that looks at relationships between data points and how they can be combined into more meaningful statements. Specifically, we are using the so called “DBSCAN” clustering algorithm (LINK), which allows us to choose the number of markings required to be defined a cluster family and the maximum of distance allowed for a different marking before being ‘rejected’ from that cluster family. Once the cluster members have been determined, simple mean values of all marking parameters are taken to determine the resulting marking, and Figure 3 shows the results of that.
Figure 3: Clustered markings for P4 tile ZG7
Just look at how beautifully the clustering has merged all the markings into results have combined all the markings into data that very precisely resembles what can be seen in the original data! The two fans in the lower right have been identified with stunning precision!
For an even more impressive display of this, have a look at the animated GIF below that allows you to track the visible fans, how they are being marked and how these markings are combined in a very precise representation of the object on the ground. It’s marvelous and I’m simply blown away by the quality of the data that we have received and how well this works!
Figure 4: Animated GIF for the clustering of the markings of APF0000zg7
This is not meant to say though that all is peachy and we can sit back and push some buttons to get these nice results. Sometimes they don’t look as nice as these, and we need to carefully balance the amount of work we invest into fixing those because we need to get the publication out into the world, so that all the Citizen scientists can see the fruit of their labor! And sometimes it’s not even clear to us if what we see is a fan or a blotch, but that distinction is of course only a mental help for the fact if there was wind blowing at the time of a CO2 gas eruption or not. So we have some ideas how to deal with those situations and that is one of the final things we are working on before submitting the paper. We are very close so please stay tuned and keep submitting these kind of stunningly precise markings!
For your viewing pleasure I finish with another example of how nicely the clustering algorithm works to create final markings for a PlanetFour image:
Figure 5: Animation for the clustered markings process of P4 image ZMJ
NASA funding for utilizing Planet Four markings
It is really-really tough to get funding to do research. You have to have an idea to do something really new and important, something that will be interesting and useful. You need to gather a team that can do it. Then you have to write a proposal to explain your idea and to convince other scientists that this project is worth pursuing. And you’ll be competing with other projects for the limited budget pot. It was even tougher than usual this year for planetary research at NASA: only 14% of all submitted projects got funding.
But we did!
A little project that utilizes the data from Planet Four will be funded by NASA so that we can compare directions of winds mapped by our citizen scientists (via fans, of course!) to the prediction of martian climate models!
This is so very exciting!
We have a great team here and I am convinced this project will be a great success! Thanks NASA and thanks all of our helpers on planet4!
Anya
Making the Final Push for the First Paper
After two years, thanks to your time and effort we’re the closest ever to submitting the first Planet Four science paper based on Season 2 and Season 3 HiIRSE observations. To make the final push to get the paper submitted in the next several months to a scientific journal, the science team has switched to having telecons every two weeks. As of today, we’ve got more than half the paper draft written. Michael is working on creating the catalog of fans and blotches by combining the multiple classifier markings for each cutout. I’m in the middle of analyzing the gold standard data where the science team classified a small subset of the tiles to compare to the fan and blotch catalog in order to assess the accuracy and recall rate of Planet Four at identifying fans and blotches. Chuhong has completed the pipeline to get the map projection and spacecraft information we need. Everyone, including Anya and Candy, has been working on the paper text.
Thank you for helping us get this far. We couldn’t do this without you, and we still need your help. After doing some checks on the tiles, we realized that a subset of the Season 2 and Season 3 tiles still need classifications to get them over our 30 classification completion limit. We’ve put these images back into rotation on the site, and paused most of the recent Inca City data until these tiles are completed. The faster we get the classifications for the remaining Season 2 and Season 3 images, the faster we can get to producing the final catalog for the first paper and start showing the latest Inca City images again.
If you have some time to spare, let’s make the final push for the first paper. Help map the final set of Season 2 and Season 3 HiRISE observations today at http://www.planetfour.org . Thanks for being a part of Planet Four, and thank you for your help.
Brand New Images of Inca City!
For the past while we’ve been focusing on Inca City, and now we have even more images for you to explore. As our way of saying thanks for the hard work and time you put into Planet Four over the past two years, we’ve uploaded the 6 HiRISE images (find out more in here and here) that were publicly released by our friends on the HiRISE team based on your vote back in August.
The cutouts shown on Planet Four are HiRISE images are nearly as close to right off the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as we can get. These observations span from this past August,when the sun began to rise about the horizon ( the start of the Season 5 monitoring campaign), to as recent as November of last year.
The images will add to our understanding of the South Pole and its seasonal processes. We have already Season1-3 of Inca City classified thanks to your help. The science team is working now on analyzing those results. We have Season 4 and now 5 of Inca City soon to come with your clicks. These new images will expand the baseline we have on the behavior of the geysers,fans, and blotches to 5 Martian years.
If you have a moment or two to spare, please help by mapping fans and blotches today at http://www.planetfour.org.
Happy 2nd Birthday Planet Four
It has been two years since we went public with the Planet Four citizen science project. Our volunteers (you!) have been amazing. We hope you enjoy looking at these images of Mars, taken of very non-earthly terrain. One of my favorite things to do is to visit the chat boards on Talk. I enjoy reading the conversations and seeing you all interacting.
Please know that your efforts are very much appreciated! We are working on our first scientific publication. We have had some technical challenges to solve, but I think that after this first paper the others will flow more quickly. Meanwhile we continue to collect great data and lengthen our time span of observations.
Believe it or not we are hoping for another large dust storm. We have ideas about interannual variability in the weather on Mars and how that affects the seasonal activity. But we need another dust storm and then another period of recovery to test our hypotheses.
Some of you have wondered when we might start putting out images of spring in the northern hemisphere to analyze. We’d like to be sure we have the problems on our end solved, and we have ideas about how to improve your interface to the images. So it will be a while yet, but it is definitely something I’d like to see happen!
Candy Hansen
Planet Four Principal Investigator
Help celebrate Planet Four’s birthday by mapping fans and blotches today at http://www.planetfour.org
Happy New Earth Year
Happy New Earth Year, Earthlings! Thanks for all of your help this year. If you’re a Martian, you’ll have to wait another few months (June 18, 2015 to be exact) to celebrate Mars Year 32 drawing to a close . That’s because Mars takes nearly twice as long ( 687 days) as the Earth to complete one revolution around the Sun. To mark another Earth year of Planet Four, we have gathered together some favorite images suggested on Talk. Enjoy!
Planet Four Blog 