WeMartians Interview: Citizen Science on Mars

WeMartians is a brand new podcast aimed to engage the public in the exploration of Mars. The latest episode is about citizen science on Mars with Michael talking about Planet Four and Planet Four: Terrains. Listen to Michael (and cameos of other familiar Zooniverse voices) below or on the WeMartians website.

April 5, 2016

Countdown to Picking New Proposed HiRISE Targets

One of the key goals of Planet Four: Terrains is to identify new areas of interest to observe with HiRISE during the seasonal processes campaign so that we better learn about the carbon dioxide geyser process and about how and were spiders and related channels form. You can read more about the particular goals of Planet Four: Terrains here. Over the months we’ve read the discussions and comments on Talk and been making a list of regions to consider from your observations. We’re really intrigued by many of the things you’ve all spotted. Which is fantastic news! Talk has been a huge asset for this work, but we’re also using the classifications from the classification interface as well. I’ve spent the past three weeks putting together a software pipeline to take the multiple classifications per CTX subframe (typically 20 people review each subject image) to identify spiders, baby spiders, channel networks, craters, and the Swiss Cheese Terrain.

Now that the machinery is all together combined with the interesting gems on Talk we’re ready to make our list of proposed new HiRISE monitoring targets. By April 20th I aim t provide the rest of the Planet Four: Terrains science team a compiled list of locations for them to review. Then Anya will input these into the HiRISE planning system where they will be considered with the HiRSE team’s science goals and eventually Candy who wears many hats including Deputy Director of the HiRISE camera and lead of the seasonal processes campaign will prioritize these new areas with the already existing targets in the seasonal processes observing program. We aim to be ready for HiRISE’s first attempt to image the South Pole which is coming up in about 60 days or so.

This is where you come in. We have new images of different areas on the site now. There have already been some interesting images from this set I’ve forwarded to the rest of the team after seeing discussions on Talk. Let’s make a push to classify as much of the new data set as possible before the 18th of April. The more subjects reviewed the greater chance to include those areas at the start of the monitoring campaign. Not to worry though, we’ll also have a few chances to include additional targets later in the Spring Season to the HiRISE monitoring campaign if need be or to the next one.

If you have a free moment, classify an image or two at http://terrains.planetfour.org

March 16, 2016

Macclesfield (informally) on Mars

Thanks to everyone who voted in our poll to nickname the next target region of Planet Four. After 406 votes cast, you can see the final tallied results for yourself below.

Screen Shot 2016-03-16 at 10.27.34 AM

After a tight race with Potsdam, Macclesfield has emerged victorious and will be the chosen informal name that we will use from now on to refer to the HiRISE target located at -85.4 degrees N Latitude and 103.9 degrees East Longitude. Below is a view of the newly nicknamed region. Note that this is an informal name for the area on the Martian South Pole. We’ll use the name internally within Planet Four and to refer to it in publications, but this name has not been adopted as the location’s formal name by the International Astronomy Union. We have updated the text in the current Planet Four paper draft to reflect the new nickname.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona – http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_020242_0945

The Earthly version of Macclesfield is the home to Jodrell Bank Observatory located on the outskirts of the town. Jodrell Bank is home to the large Lovell Telescope (currently the third largest steerable radio telescope in the world) and BBC Stargazing Live, which is broadcast live yearly from outside of Macclesfield. Planet Four launched on BBC Stargazing Live on January 2013. The name was suggested as an homage to the launch of Planet Four and BBC Stargazing Live.

Lovell Telescope (animation credit: Zooniverse) – Original image source

Season 1 images from the new crowned Martian Macclesfield are live on the original Planet Four right now.Classify fans and blotches in Macclesfield at www.planetfour.org

March 13, 2016

Brand New Images on Planet Four: Terrains

We’ve been finding interesting regions thanks to your classifications and your Planet Four: Terrains Talk comments. We’ll soon be start preparing for the upcoming HiRISE seasonal monitoring campaign and selecting our final list of new targets for HiRISE. The Sun will be fully above the horizon of the Martian South Pole and conditions will be favorable for imaging sometime around July, so we need to get started very soon. The excellent news is that thanks to your help, we’ve completed the original set of CTX images that we had planned for the project. Here’s where on the coverage of the CTX images that we selected and you’ve been classifying since June.

CTX coverage with MOLA elevation map (Courtesy of JMARS )

CTX (Context Camera) image coverage in cyan with MOLA elevation map (Red is higher elevation) (Courtesy of JMARS )

The even more exciting news is that we’re extending the project and have uploaded a new set of CTX images to the website! Looking at the preliminary analysis of your classifications, we’re seeing interesting patterns in the distributions of spiders, baby spiders, and swiss cheese terrain. We want to investigate this further by covering more of the South Pole that we hadn’t looked at already. These CTX images have never before been looked at by human eyes in such detail before. There are bound to be something interesting, and if so we will still have time to add the region to our HiRISE target list.

Here’s a comparison of the location of the new CTX images in dark blue compared to the our first set of observations on the reviewed on the site in cyan.

CTX coverage with MOLA elevation map (Courtesy of JMARS ) Blue = coverage of new images just uploaded Cyan = locations of previous images classified

Help search the new CTX images or spiders, swiss cheese terrain, and more by classifying an image or two at http://terrains.planetfour.org

March 11, 2016

10 Years in Martian Orbit for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Yesterday marked a decade since Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) went into orbit around the Red Planet. A few months later science observations commenced, and since then the mission has been studying the Martian surface and atmosphere. We use MRO data on both Planet Four (HiRISE [HIgh Resolution Imaging Science Experiment] images) and Planet Four: Terrains (Context Camera [CTX] images). Thanks to the contributions of those at NASA and the instrument teams (including engineers, scientists, software programmers, and other operations support team members) who make these observations happen and keep the spacecraft and its suite of instruments happy and healthy.

With 10 Earth years (or ~5 Mars years) of observations, we can look for long term changes in the geyser formation process, and this summer we’ll be pointing HiRISE to new regions of the South Pole thanks to the contributions from Planet Four: Terrains volunteers for monitoring for several more Mars years.

Below is a highlight reel compiled by NASA of MRO’s greatest science hits and images over the last decade.

There have been so many iconic moments from the MRO’s mission, but I think two moments are HIRISE capturing the descent stage of the the Curiosity rover with the parachute and the parachute of the Phoenix lander several years before.

Image Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona http://www.uahirise.org/releases/msl-descent.php

HiRISE captures the descent of NASA’s Curiosity rover Image Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona http://www.uahirise.org/releases/msl-descent.php

Parachute of the Phoenix lander snapped by HiRISE during the entry, landing, and descent of the polar lander – Image Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona – original image

Happy Anniversary MRO! – Here’s to the next decade around Mars! Celebrate by classifying a few images on Planet Four and Planet Four: Terrains

March 1, 2016

Vote for the Informal Nickname of the Next Planet Four Target Region

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:

1. Potsdam – Suggested by Candy Hansen (Planet Four PI) – Generally the HiRISE seasonal polar monitoring campaign has used New York regions for the informal region names. (like ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Manhattan’). Postdam, USA is in the state of New York, and I have a friend that grew up there.

2. Wellington – Suggested by John Keegan (Planet Four Talk Moderator) – Known as the windiest and most southerly capital city in the world. It has an annual average windspeed around 16 knots/hr (18 miles/hr). Wellington is located in what is known as a River of Wind, between the South and North Islands of New Zealand.

3. Chicago – Suggested by Andy Martin (Planet Four Talk Moderator) – The windy city, Chicago, USA because of the number of wind directions we see.

4. Oxford – Suggested by Grant Miller (Zooniverse Communications Lead) – Oxford, UK is the birthplace and home town of the Zooniverse and therefore in turn the Planet Four project.

5. Calistoga – Suggested by Michael Parrish (Zooniverse developer who built Planet Four Talk ) – Calistoga, USA is the home of “Little Old Faithful” (also known as the Old Faithful of California). artificial geyser/erupting geothermal well

6. Macclesfield – Suggested by Meg Schwamb (Planet Four Scientist) – Planet Four launched at BBC Stargazing Live in 2013 at Jodrell Bank. Macclesfield, UK is the name of the town the telescope is on the outskirts of.

Vote by March 15th.

**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.

February 26, 2016

Craters on the Martian South Polar Deposits

Today we have a guest post from Margaret Landis. Margaret is a third year PhD student at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, where she studies impacts and frost transport on Mars

CTX image B08_012814_0962_XN_83S173W of a portion of the South Polar Layered Deposits – Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science

Impacts, from asteroids and comets, occur on every solid surface in the solar system. When a space rock hits a planet, it leaves behind an explosion crater depending on how large the space rock was and how strong the target material is. How we study and count these tells us an incredible amount about the history and composition of the surface: this is one of the reasons why I’m excited about Planet Four: Terrains’ Mars south polar crater tagging!

First of all, craters expose the layers underneath the surface of a planet. Just look at terraced craters on Mars. Of course material can also fill in craters, which means craters are interesting laboratories for exploring the material a planet is made out of.

Second, and what I am primarily interested in for Mars, is that craters can act like a clock for the age of a surface. The number and size of craters on a surface is primarily determined by the types of impactors that are hitting the planet, and we can find this out in a couple of ways. One is looking at the number of asteroids of a particular size which we can do using telescopes, and another is looking at the number of craters that form per a particular period of time. The next step is to find the period of time a certain number of impacts happened over. For the Moon, this is relatively straightforward because there are samples of the rocks returned from the Apollo missions. Using laboratory techniques, geochemists can get an age for the rock. This is a reference point: a certain number of craters on a surface is a given age from the age of a rock returned from the lunar surface. When this is translated to Mars, this becomes much easier said than done.

In essence, if the size of craters is measured and the number of craters at each size are counted up, that can be translated to the number of space rocks that have hit the surface. If we know the rate at which that occurs, we know how old the surface is.

Why do we care about figuring out how old a surface is? For the north and south polar deposits on Mars, they are made mostly of water and carbon dioxide ices. These are powerful greenhouse gasses and could make up a large amount of a possible martian atmosphere. When and where these ices are on the surface tells us more about where and when the martian atmosphere could have gone, as well as Mars’ climate in the recent past.

For example, the polar layered deposits (PLD) are layers of different thickness and dust content, two things that are controlled by the local climate at the time that layer formed. We can measure the relative thinnesses of the layers and get some ideas about how long they took to form. These are similar to ice cores from the Earth, collecting information about what was in the air at certain times. However, unlike using ice cores on the Earth where we can measure the radioactive isotopes trapped within the dust in the ice and determine how old a certain layer is, we don’t have that capability for doing that on other planets yet. So, how can we get an age at a point in the south PLD (SPLD) stack of layers? From the crater age dating!

The residual ice cap is generally considered the layer of the SPLD forming at present day. Using craters, we can come up with an age of the surface.

Once again, this sounds simple but is much more complicated. One of the complicating factors is that the large surface area of the uppermost layer of the SPLD (the southern residual ice cap), and all of it has to be looked over for craters. Another thing that makes the south pole more complicated is that the exotic behavior of the carbon dioxide ice (like “spiders”, geysers, and pit formation) makes for sometimes circular features that are not impact craters, or can quickly hide the tell-tale signs of craters. The longer craters have been sitting out in the erosive environment of Mars, and the softer the rim appears and the flatter the floors become. These old craters can also be covered by other features, too. This is the perfect example of a task that one person could do, but it would take a long time.

This is where citizen science comes in: there are 90,000 km^2 on the surface of the south polar deposits! With lots of people looking over lots of images, the cataloging of craters becomes much faster and straightforward. This means that the crater counts go more quickly and accurately, which fits into figuring out the surface age and recent geologic history of the south polar deposits.

With all the images tagged as containing craters, I’ll build a crater database in order to enter Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) suggestions to get more detailed images of each of the craters in order to mark their location and measure their diameter. South polar summer happens later this year, and I’ll be sure to write an update on the project’s progress!

February 11, 2016

Planet Four at the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference

The abstracts for the accepted posters and talks at the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) are now posted online. At the meeting in March, Planet Four and Planet Four: Terrains will be well represented at the Woodlands, Texas. Michael and Candy will be there with two posters presenting results thanks to your time and your clicks.

You can read Michael’s Planet Four poster abstract here and Candy’s poster abstract on Planet Four: Terrains here. The Planet Four: Terrains abstract contains examples of areas of interest found thanks to volunteers on Talk posting about what they’ve seen on Talk. Thanks especially to Ray Perry, Andy Martin, and Bill Wagner for their help spotting some interesting images that were included in the abstract.

January 26, 2016

New images on Planet Four: Terrains

Image Credit: Planet Four tile derived from a CTX image – NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

We’ve uploaded a new batch of CTX data onto Planet Four: Terrains. These new images have never been reviewed by human eyes in such detail before. With your help, Planet Four: Terrains aims to map where different types of Martian terrains occur in images taken of the South Pole by the Context Camera aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. We will use the locations you identify to find new areas of interest to serve as targets for detailed study with the HiRISE camera, the highest resolution camera ever sent to a planet! These high resolution images in turn will end up on the original Planet Four to study the fan and blotch cycle in these new areas.

Who knows what interesting finds might be waiting in these new images. Explore the South Pole of the Red Planet today and help identify terrains at http://terrains.planetfour.org

January 23, 2016

Mars and the Planetary Gang in the Early Morning Sky

Wake up early and view our planetary neighbors in all their glory. Starting this weekend you’ll be able to find Mars and four other planets from our Solar System visible in the early morning sky. In addition to the Red Planet, this planetary alignment includes Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. Some of the planets will continue be visible for over two or three weeks, but the best time to see all five is from Saturday, January 23 through the first week of February.

Below is a guide to help direct you to the right spot. Just before dawn (about 45 minutes before) while the sky is is still dark will be the best time to look.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Most of the planets are bright compared to stars in the sky so you should be able to glimpse them without the need of a telescope or binoculars, though you’ll likely need binoculars to spot tiny Mercury. If you’re having trouble identifying the planets from the backgrounds stars in the patch of sky, this (below) might help.

Mars should stand out as it will have a reddish tint thanks to all the iron oxide dust (or maybe better to say rusty dust) that covers it surface and swirls in its atmosphere. The bright star Spica will be in the middle between Jupiter and Mars, but our own Moon will also join this cosmic display, so if you’re having a hard time finding the planets, then try on the morning around February 1st. That’s when our Moon will be visible near Mars.

You can find more details on how to spot this early morning show here and here. If you do spot Mars, take a moment to think about the fact that you’re viewing a world that you can help better understand how the atmosphere/climate of this distant world works. You can explore Mars and help map seasonal fans on the South Pole of Mars with the Zooniverse’s Planet Four project ( http://www.planetfour.org), and if you do get a glimpse of Mars, post your photos in the comments section and we’ll post them here in a future blog post.

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