Dust Devil Tracks or a Jackson Pollock Painting?
A subframe CTX image on Planet Four: Terrains showing many dust devil tracks. Discuss this image at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mschwamb/planet-four-terrains/talk/subjects/1041527/
You might have seen an image like the one above while classifying on Planet Four: Terrains. It reminds me of Jackson Pollock’s painting style. Those dark lines crisscrossing the image are actually dust devil tracks. Dust devils are mini-tornadoes on the surface of Mars, kicking up and clearing dust in their paths. Dust devils exist in the plains and deserts on Earth. The Martian equivalent can be considerably bigger than those found on Earth. Their tracks can be seen from orbit in images from CTX and other cameras.
Here’s what dust devils look like from orbit. This image was captured by the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
A dust devil spotted from orbit. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona – More info at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/pia15116.html
Dust devils have been caught in the act on the ground in the mid-latitudes by several robotic rovers and landers including the Mars Exploration Rovers (Opportunity and Spirit). Actually Spirit and Opportunity have had dust devils pass over them, cleaning their solar panels. Below was a series of dust devils passing through nearby the Spirit rover in Gusev crater.
Dust devils in Gusev Crater spotted by the Spirit rover – Image credit: NASA/JPL – /Texas A&M – More info at http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/press/spirit/20050819a.html
You might be wondering why we don’t ask you to mark these in the main Planet Four: Terrains interface. The reason is because they’re so ubiquitous that a full map of their locations isn’t needed, but if you’re interested you can identify images like this on Talk using the #dustdeviltracks hashtag.
Thanks to volunteer o0ohando0o for spotting this image and posting about it on Planet Four: Terrains Talk. You can find more examples of dust devil tracks as well as other things you might encounter in the Planet Four: Terrains images in our Site Guide.
DPS 2015
Image credit: DPS
Greeting from somewhere over the Pacific ocean. I’m on a plane headed for the National Harbor, Maryland for the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting. This is one of the largest yearly gathering of planetary scientists in the world with people presenting work on a wide variety of topics including the Jovian satellites, comets, Mars, exoplanets, and Kuiper belt objects.
The entire core Planet Four science team will be attending the meeting this year, and Michael will presenting a poster on Planet Four and some new preliminary results. As the team is scattered in a few different places, this is the first time that we all will be in the same room together. We’ve mostly been working together remotely thanks to Skype, email, twitter, and telecons, with a few individual visits interspersed over the past few years.
DPS will be an intense week of talks, posters, cool new science results, catching up with collaborators, and saying hello to old friends. I’m looking forward to it and to the Planet Four team dinner we have scheduled later in the week to to plan the coming months of data reduction and most importantly to sit down to all work on the final tasks for the first paper.
You can follow along with all the latest news and happenings from DPS attendees tweeting with the hasthag #DPS15
New Images on Planet Four: Terrains
Thanks to your help we’ve added in new images to Planet Four: Terrains. Like the image above, these are additional locations on the South Pole that we hope might contain activity from the seasonal carbon dioxide geysers. These images have never been looked at by humans in such detail before. Who knows what interesting things you might find.
Help classify an image or two today at http://terrains.planetfour.org
A Zoominar
Greetings from Oxford, UK where the spires are looking lovely in the Autumn weather. I’ve been on a bit of a Planet Four talk tour this 2 weeks between WIRED2015 and the Bash Symposium. I’m spending a few days at the Oxford Zooniverse HQ before heading back to Taiwan. I’ll be spending some time working on a few projects while I’m here in Oxford including Planet Four and especially on the next steps for Planet Four: Terrains data analysis. I got asked to give a short Zoominar (the Oxford Zooniverse group’s seminar series) to introduce the motivations behind Planet Four and a quick status report of where we are with the project for the Zooniverse core team in Oxford and other interested folks. I thought I’d share my slides. The slide show below is adapted from my talk.
Planet Four at WIRED2015
A huge thanks to the WIREDUK team for giving me the opportunity to talk about Planet Four at WIRED2015. It was an amazing experience to share what the hard work and effort that everyone involved in Planet (including over 130,000 people across the Earth) is achieving on Mars. I ended my talk with ‘people on this world are helping us study the next,’ and it’s absolutely true. If you do have a spare minute, we have lots images to still go through. You can contribute to the Mars exploration today at http://www.planetfour.org and http://terrains.planetfour.org
We made the highlights from the first day video:
Here’s some pictures I took from the two days:
Meg Schwamb from the Planet Four Team talking about the project at WIRED2015 – image credit: @blkbeveragesUK (https://twitter.com/blkbeveragesUK)
WIRED2015 meets Planet Four
I’m thrilled to say that I’ll be talking today about Planet Four and Planet Four: Terrains at this year’s WIRED2015 in London. I’m one of 14 Innovation Fellows selected this year by WIRED UK that will be speaking at today and tomorrow’s event. You can follow along on Twitter with #WIRED2015.
I’m excited to be included in such a fantastic line up of artists, musicians, chefs, activists, authors, scientists, engineers, and innovators. I’ll be speaking today in the aptly named ‘Turning Data Into Understanding’ session. I’ll be be sharing the motivations behind the projects, and the work of the 130,000+ collaborators who click by click are helping to better understand Mars. It really is due to your help and effort that we can explore the seasonal processes of the Mars’ south pole like never before.
Thank you for all your contributions, and there’s more of the South Pole to sift through. So if you have a spare moment, please map a fan or two on Planet Four or classify an image at Planet Four: Terrains.
Parts of WIRED2015 will be live streamed. A selection of the talks will be shown here over the next two days. So you might be able to catch my talk which is scheduled from 5:35 to 5:50 pm BST today. The full agenda can be found here.
Upgrades to Planet Four: Terrains Talk
There have been some great new features added in to Planet Four: Terrains Talk by the Zooniverse developers over the past few weeks and months. Here’s a consolidated list of many of the new improvements and features:
- There’s a notification system which will send you emails if you get private messages, threads you join, threads you’d like to follow, and threads you’re mentioned in. You can change your email/notification settings in your profile.
- You can change the notifications preference for individual discussion threads by clicking subscribe/unsubscribe to cycle through the options. Those preferences will only be set for that thread, you global settings in your profile will be used for all other threads.
- The way replies work has have been updated – so now there’s a embedded link to the person’s comment you’re replying to.
New replies format
- There is a new recent comments stream. There’s a Planet Four: Terrains Talk wide version (you can access it through the right side bar on the Talk front page). There are also ones for each board (you can find the link on the right side sidebar).
The orange box shows where the Recent Comments link is
- There’s a new mentions capability. If you want to include someone in a conversation and trigger an email/notification you can mention the person by adding an ‘@’ in front of their username. You can find out what to include to mention a given volunteer by looking to the left of their post.
In the case above if you wanted to add moderator wassock to your conversation you’d write @wassock. Also if you need to contact both Planet Four: Talk moderators (@wassock and @Kitharode) you can mention them with @moderators in a post.
- Is there an image you’ve come across that relates to an on-going discussion? If so, you can add a link to it your post by writing ^S<subject_id> and replacing <subject_id> with the image’s subject id. It will automatically link in the image’s subject page (e.g. ^S475492 ) . You can find that image’s subject id on top of the notes pages or listed above the image being discussed
Ways to find the subject ID.
The Zooniverse development team is continuing to improve and update the latest version of Talk. More features will be added over the next few months. Stay tuned to the blog for more details. If you have suggestions for new features you’d like to see in Planet Four: Terrains Talk, feel free to add your thoughts to our feature request thread.
Zooniverse Talk
Planet Four: Terrains was launched in June on the Zooniverse’s latest platform and part of that system is a new Zooniverse wide Talk. It’s a place where you can keep up with the latest news across the Zooniverse, interact with people who are counting penguins all the way to transcribing ships logs, and communicate with the Zooniverse team.
Zooniverse Talk also hosts a Daily Zooniverse suggestion board. So if you’ve seen a particularly interesting image on Planet Four or Planet Four: Terrains, can you suggest it for the Daily Zooniverse here. Also there’s a dedicated board for the young adult and middle school/high school age students. You can find the Teen Talk discussion board here.
If you have thoughts about the wider Zooniverse or want to share how awesome you think Planet Four or Planet Four:Terrains is, you can access Zooniverse Talk http://talk.zooniverse.org
The Changing View of Inca City
I stumbled upon a week or so ago across these past images of Inca City captured by various NASA spacecraft on the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive’s Mars Photogallery, and I thought I would share.
As you know the HiRISE team has unofficial nicknames for many of the regions that are monitored with HiRISE for the South Pole Seasonal Processes. Some of these you’re familiar with: ‘Inca City’, ‘Manhattan’, ‘Giza’, etc, but Inca City’s nickname comes from actually the days of the Mariner missions.
Mariner 9 imaged the Inca City area in the 1970s, and the story supposedly goes that the geographic features reminded the science team of a fallen or buried city and the moniker has stuck up until present.
Inca City imaged by Mariner 9 in 1972 – Image Credit – Mariner 9/NASA – Image source: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/photogallery-mars.html
I talked the other day about the modern day views of Inca City, but here are some taken over time. It’s amazing to see how our view of this region has sharpened and come into focus.
Inca City Imaged by Viking 2 -I mage Credit – Viking 2/NASA – Original content: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/photogallery-mars.html
Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) view – image credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems – Original source – http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/science_paper/f5/
CTX view of Inca City – Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems – Original Content – http://viewer.mars.asu.edu/viewer/ctx#P=D10_031297_0984_XN_81S064W&T=2
CTX observation – The red box shows the location of the high resolution HiRISE image displayed below. Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science System
Higher resolution HIRISE observation – Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Inca City if you recall is one the regions concentrated with boulders as seen in the HiRISE images, but if you zoom out you like in the Mariner 9 image you can see honeycomb features that are interconnecting rectilinear ridges. How exactly this formed was not fully known, but with the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) has shed some light on the regions origin.
Mars Orbiter Camera aboard MGS sees for the first time that Inca City is associated with a larger circular feature. One prevailing theory is that larger structure is a impact crater that has been buried or filled in and partly exhumed. Even if it an impact crater, there are several proposed mechanisms resulting from this situation that could produce the geographic features in Inca City. If it is an impact origin than very like the boulders you’ve seen in the images reviewed on Planet Four that are spread across Inca City are impact derived.
MGS MOC observation of Inca City – Image Credit: Images Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems – Original Content – http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/8_2002_releases/incacity/
Annotated MGS MOC observation of Inca City – Image Credit: Images Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems – Original Content – http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/8_2002_releases/incacity/
A Different View of ‘Inca City’
We see high resolution non-map projected color mosaic images of the Martian South Pole from HiRISE, but with the Context Camera (On Planet Four: Terrains we show the diced up CTX images), you can get a wide view perspective. This is the main drive of Planet Four: Terrains, to use the wide-field Context Camera (CTX) images to find new areas of interest that we can then explore and study in detail.
On the original Planet Four, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years focusing on the region informally known as ‘Inca City.’ With CTX can you can get a bird’s eye view of Inca City and its structure. Check out the image below. You’ll notice the unique pattern of interconnecting rectilinear ridges that the region is known for.
Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science System
You can view the full resolution version of this image here
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