Ho Ho Ho, Happy New Year! New paper! New data!
Hello beloved Planet Four Citizen Scientists!
This is Michael, reporting back after a long break of activity.
What happened in 2022? Anya and I were very busy with moving our family with our toddler son, dog, and cat back to Germany. We have finally settled into our new jobs here in Berlin and I finally had some time to prepare a new data set for our original Planet Four project!
Another good news is that another paper based on Planet Four results was accepted this year: Planet Four: A Neural Network’s search for polar spring-time fans on Mars, led by our Australian colleagues, Mark McDonnell and Eriita Jones, with Meg being the corresponding author. The paper investigates how a basic approach of machine-learning to our fan and blotch identification problem compares to the results of our citizen-science approach. And we can happily report that the citizen science approach fares very well and cannot be reached yet in its precision for getting the best out of the data.
However, what we can learn from the paper as well that there is quite some potential to make the work less boring and more efficient for citizen scientists, by using the machine-learning approach to filter out data that with large certainty does not contain anything of interest for marking. We are looking forward to implementing some of these approaches into our pipeline this year, so that we can churn through datasets more quickly, with your help!
The paper is published here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103522004006 and available for free here https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09152
About the new data: this time we are going for extending the time series coverage of some of our favourite regions of interest: Inca City, Giza, and Macclesfield. This data spans the mission years 5 to 8 for Macclesfield, and 7 to 8 for Inca City and Giza.
We sincerely hope that many of you can find your way back to us after such a long break and we wish you lots of fun in exploring more beautiful Martian landscapes.
Wishing you a healthy and successful 2023!
Michael, for the Planet Four team!
Planet Four in French
The Planet Four website is now available in French. A big thank you to Louis who volunteered to lead the translation effort. We asked him to write a few words:
My name is Louis Verhaeghe, I am a French student, I am currently in BTS CRSA (Brevet de Technicien Supérieur – Design and Realization of Automated System), I intend to continue my studies via a License in Robotics Engineering.
Later I would like to work on planetary satellites and maybe if I’m lucky on intergalactic probes.
Although I have more than 12,000 classifications on Zooniverse, I think the translations of different projects is my most important contribution because it allows thousands and thousands of French speakers who do not speak English to be able to participate in the immense citizen science effort that is the Zooniverse platform.
I am also a fairly seasoned amateur astronomer, I like to believe that the Fermi Paradox will find an answer one day.
If you’re interested in translating one of the Planet Four projects do get in touch on Talk!
A View From Mars
Anya and Michael were recently interviewed about Planet Four for the Fiske Planetarium’s podcast, A View from Earth. Have a listen down below.
The Invisible Winds that Shape the Fans
Today we have a guest post by Tim Michaels. Tim is a research scientist at the SETI Institute who studies how the weather and climate of other worlds affects their surface features.
The Planet Four science team has recently been using the catalog of your fan markings to compare to the wind speed and direction estimated by computer calculations of how Mars’ atmosphere moves around. These wind estimates are calculated by a complex computer program known as a mesoscale atmospheric model, very similar to those that forecast the daily weather on Earth. There are no actual wind measurements in the southern polar regions of Mars, so we use these modeled wind estimates to better interpret what your fan markings tell us about the planet’s weather and climate.
The figure below shows an example of the modeled wind estimates near the Manhattan Classic fan site (86.4S, 99.0E) in the early evening at Ls 190. The area shown is about 135 km by 135 km, south is toward the upper right side, and every arrow is about 1.5 km apart (every model gridpoint; the numbers on the sides count these). This area is at the head (top) of the great south polar valley Chasma Australe, and the white topographic contours (in meters) show the upper reaches of that valley running downhill from center right toward the lower left. The arrows show wind direction and speed (arrow length, see the 10 m/s scale in the upper right corner). Wind speed is also indicated by the color of the arrows — cooler colors (like blue and purple) for the slower winds, warmer colors (like red and orange) for the faster winds. The fastest wind speeds in this scene are about 11 m/s.
You can see how the wind directions and speeds vary a lot across this area — those patterns change quite a bit with the time of day, as well. Our preliminary results show that the strong winds from the east near the center of this figure may be related to the formation of the fans in this area. Much more work still needs to be done to better understand what all of your markings of fans and blotches tell us about the winds on Mars, but we wanted to give you a glimpse of what the (invisible) winds that sculpt the fans may look like.
Planet Four on Planet Three
The Planet Four team has participated in a couple of outreach events over the past few months. We wanted to share the links with you.
Michael, Candy, and myself from the core Planet Four team with Zooniverse Co-PI Laura Trouille were featured on a Live Chat/webinar with the Science Friday team today (Monday April 27) . It was great combo of tea discussion, answering questions from the viewers, and demos. You can find the recorded video on Facebook live; https://www.facebook.com/scifri/videos/158389675615673
A few weeks later, I was interviewed on the BBC Sky at Night’s May episode talking about Planet Four and the other projects that make up the Planet Four organization. If you’re living in then UK, the episode is available online for stream in BBC iplayer. It also happened to be the 800th episode of the Sky at Night, and it was also the first episode where all the presenters, Sky at Night crew, and interviewees were all working from home.
In these challenging times, I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone for their contributions to all three Planet Four projects. We appreciate the time, effort, and energy you are contributing.
Building the NASA Citizen Science Community Meeting
Greeting from Tucson Arizona. I’m here with Planet Four PI Candy Hansen at the Building the NASA Citizen Science Community Meeting. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers engaged in successful citizen science projects, citizen science experts and platforms supporting citizen science projects (including representatives from Zooniverse), the NASA Science Mission Directorate, and researchers interested in applying citizen science to their research problems.
I gave an invited talk (my slides are included below) highlighting science results and the success of Planet Four and advertising Planet Four: Terrains and Planet Four: Ridges. It’s exciting that people in the planetary and astronomical community see Planet Four as a successful project. That is in large part due to the contributions of the Planet Four volunteer community. It was great to talk about Planet Four’s first paper and also mention the science team is working on three other publications right now based on the first fan and blotch catalog.
Planet Four paper accepted!
Dear fellow Planet-Four-ians,
It is my great pleasure to announce that the Icarus journal has accepted our paper “Planet Four: Probing Springtime Winds on Mars by Mapping the Southern Polar CO2 Jet Deposits” for publication!
The edits requested by the reviewers were minor, we addressed what we thought was appropriate for the already huge scope this paper tries to encompass and the editors agreed to our submitted revision. I have also updated the arXiv preprint version with that submitted revision and it is now available in its final “content” form here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10341. We publicly acknowledge everyone who contributed to the classifications that went into this paper and gave us their permission to use their name on the page https://www.planetfour.org/authors.
We now have entered the phase of typesetting the article where the formatting towards the style of the journal is happening and things like placement of figures is being decided on.
Next in line of activities for Planet Four is waiting for the selection of NASA’s Solar System Workings proposals, where we submitted in spring to receive funding for a deeper exploitation of the results of Planet Four and to use it to guide the creation of a geophysical model of CO2 jets. We expect that the selections are made in the first half of September, according to recent information we have received.
Fingers crossed that we can continue further together on this exciting venture!
Tag an image or two at https://planetfour.org !
(Southern) Spring is Coming!
Southern Spring is coming to Mars very soon. May 22nd marks the official start of Spring at the Martian South Pole. We’ve been busy reducing the most recent sets of classifications from Planet Four: Terrains looking for new spider locales to target when the HiRISE and CaSSIS seasonal campaign starts. The CaSSIS camera is a recent addition to Mars, aboard the European ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). It takes slightly higher resolution images than the CTX, whose images we show on the Planet Four: Terrains website. CaSSIS is designed for stereo imaging which is key for measuring depths and heights of features. Also unlike CTX, CaSSIS is equipped with several filters so color images can be made. Even with the addition of CaSSIS, the decade old HiRISE remains the highest resolution imager (~30 cm/pixel) in action around the Red Planet.
The PI of Planet Four: Terrains, Candy Hansen is a member of the HiRISE and CaSSIS science teams , and can ask for images to be potentially taken of the Solar Polar region if we find something interesting worthy of followup observations. We’ve asked for a few additional candidate spider locations (plotted below between -70 and -75 degrees latitude) outside of the South Polar Layered Deposits to be imaged if the observations can be squeezed into these cameras’ packed schedules. If confirmed in the higher resolution images, these will be the furthest spider identifications from the South Pole. Fingers crossed we’ll get some more detailed images of these places over the coming months.
Green boxes denote candidate spider/araneiform locations found by Planet Four: Terrains
Thanks for all your help. We plan to have new images on the Planet Four: Terrains site by the start of Southern Spring, so stay tuned!
Progress on the Planet Four blotch clustering
We wanted to give a quick update on the original Planet Four. Michael Aye has been leading the development of the data analysis pipeline. As previously mentioned, we’ve hit a major milestone with completing the fan clustering algorithm for combining your classifications together. We think we’ve now hit that point for finalizing the blotch clustering algorithm.
We think we’ve now got a decent solution for addressing how to cluster very large blotches that take up half the image and very small blotches that are the default blotch circle size. Currently how we’re tackling this is clustering with one linking radius for the center of the blotch markings, and then we run the analysis again using a much larger linking radius. Here’s an example output:
Image credit: Michael Aye
This blotch clustering strategy seems to be a good compromise for our science goals and needs. We’re going to review several more test cases and if all goes well with this step, we will freeze development on the clustering pipeline. That’s one of the last hurdles to applying 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.
New Data on Planet Four
Thanks to all your help, we’ve completed the review of the Season 4 observations of Giza, Ithaca, and Macclesfield. We have new observations from Season 1 from a two different areas around the South Pole now uploaded and live on the site. These areas are nicknamed Starfish and Caterpillar for the spider morphology that have been seen in those areas. Caterpillar is much further away from the South Pole than some of the areas you’ve reviewed here before.
Locations of the Seasons 1, 2, and 3 of the HiRISE South Pole Monitoring Campaign – Image Credit: Michael Aye
It will great to see how the numbers and sizes of fans and blotches in these two areas compare to Manhattan, Macclesfield, Inca City, Ithaca, and Giza. Dive into these new images today at http://www.planetfour.org
Planet Four Blog 