Weather on Mars
We’ve mentioned before in the live chats, and Talk about how the science team would like to test whether the fan directions and the blotch measurements we ask you to make are indicators of the prevailing direction of surface winds on the South Polar regions. We think that the wind is the mostly likely culprit for the sculpting of the fans and that blotches occur when the wind was not strong enough to blow the material into the fans you see in other Planet Four images.
How will we check this? Unlike on Earth, there aren’t weather stations covering most of the globe of Mars taking pressure, temperature, and wind measurements. We’ll have to rely on computer simulations, on the output from a Global Circulation Model/Global Climate Model (GCM) of Mars. A GCM is a computer model of Mars’ atmosphere and climate that simulates all the conditions of the planet’s atmosphere and evolve it over time. PlanetWRF and Ames Mars General Circulation Model are two examples of Mars GCMs.
A GCM attempts to contain in it all the physics and chemistry that planetary scientists know and believe are acting in the planet’s atmosphere. This includes dealing with winds, pressure, atmospheric temperature, chemical reactions, impact of dust and particulate transport in the atmosphere on the whole planet and smaller scales. The simulations also have to take into account how solar insolation varies on the surface of the planet over time accounting for Mars’ orbital parameters changing as well. In addition the climate and weather impact the surface conditions which evolve on the planet over time and feedback into the climate. If you’re interested in reading more about the processes that impact the Martian climate check out the NASA AMES Mars Climate Modeling Group Climate page
Martian GCMs are trying to represent and replicate complicated processes that are happening in the Martian atmosphere. Sometimes things are parametrized to make it possible to program into a computer and may not fully represent the reaction but it is the best scientists can do. The models are continuously improved by comparing to what limited weather and atmospheric measurements we do have of Mars. Mars is the best studied and detailed climate besides Earth in the Solar System. There have been weather stations on the Mars rovers (Curiosity, Spirit, and Opportunity) and landers (including Viking, Pathfinder, Phoenix etc) measuring the wind direction, temperature, pressure etc on the ground. Both Opportunity and Curiosity are continuing to measure the current conditions at their landing sites. Also the fleet of US and European spacecraft (and two new Mars orbiters – one from India and one from the US are currently on their way to Mars) are monitoring the Martian atmosphere providing rich data sets of the upper and middle atmosphere. For example the vertical distribution of dust in the Martian atmosphere and how it changes over the Martian year is obtained from observations from the Mars Climate Sounder aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (which also is the home for the HiRISE camera that takes the images you classify).
Once we have the fan pointings and the locations of the blotches over several Martian seasons we’ll use GCMs to predict wind directions and speeds at different times and dates on the ground at the locations the images were taken and see how they compare.
4 Million and Beyond
We have just reached a huge milestone – 4 million classifications! What does that mean? To make a HiRISE image manageable, the Zooniverse team cut the images up into sub-images, called cutouts. Fans and blotches are identified in each cutout, and when a cutout has been viewed 100 times it is retired.
Four million… I am still amazed at the investment of your time that this represents. I am humbled that you all have invested your free time in this project, a bit of Mars science that delights and fascinates us by its alien nature. I hope that you have enjoyed doing this, enjoyed the pleasure of looking at this unearthly terrain.
On Mars today it is autumn in the southern hemisphere. The CO2 (carbon dioxide) is freezing and/or snowing onto the surface. Over the winter it will anneal into a sheet of translucent slab ice. In a little less than one earth year it will be spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars and we will start our 5th year of observations. Fans will pop out from under the ice like Martian crocuses. Will they be in the same place? Will the winds be stronger or weaker? Will we see any permanent changes in the surface or just the ephemeral seasonal activity?
With your continued efforts we’ll be able to detect long-term trends. As soon as our current collection of cutouts has been analyzed we will add the images from our 4th year of observations. Then we’ll add the 5th year.
Four million… You are awesome!
Candy Hansen
Planet Four Principal Investigator
World Space Week
We’ll be starting our live chat shortly. The video link is below. If you have questions for us, tweet us @planet_four.
World Space Week Live Chat
Today marks the start of World Space Week which runs from October 4-10. World Space Week is a yearly event to celebrate and promote the exploration of our solar system and beyond. The week is coordinated by the United Nations with the support of the World Space Week Association (WSWA). The start date (October 4, 1957) honors the anniversary of the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. The end date (October 10, 1967) is to commemorate the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.
This year’s theme is ‘Exploring Mars, Discovering Earth.” Here at Planet Four, with your help, we are exploring an alien process. The carbon dioxide geysers that appear at the Martian South Pole in Southern Spring and Summer have no Earthly counterpart. The prevailing winds blow the material uplifted by these geysers into dark fans and blotches seen from orbit on the ice sheet. For the past 4 Martian years, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the HiRISE camera have been imaging the South Pole to explore the seasonal change. With your help marking the blotches and fans in the HiRISE images, we can tally the numbers of fans and blotches, measure their directions and sizes, and compare how these properties change over time in a single year as well as from year to year. With these measurements, we can better understand the processes that form the geysers and impact the Martian climate itself. By studying Mars’ climate we can better understand the similarities and differences between the sister planets.
To celebrate World Space Week, the Planet Four team is hosting a live chat on Wednesday October 9th 6pm EDT/3pm PDT/11pm BST. We’ll be joined by Planet Four Science Team Members: K.-Michael Aye, Ganna (Anya) Portyankina, and Meg Schwamb . We’ll also be joined by special guests Kristin Block and Christian Schaller. Christian is a HiRISE Ground Data System Software Developer, and Kristin is a targeting specialist for the HiRISE camera. We’ll be discussing more about the Planet Four project, how HiRISE works, and the process from commanding HiRISE to the reduced images that you see on Planet Four.
We hope you’ll join us. We’ll be posting the video live here on the blog. If you have questions for the science team or for our special guests Kristin and Christian, you can post them in the comments or tweet us at @planet_four. In the meantime, why not celebrate World Space Week by exploring Mars at planetfour.org
The Planet 4 Invasion – ZooCon 13 Talk
A few months ago, the Zooniverse hosted ZooCon 13 at the Zooniverse UK HQ in Oxford. I was invited to give a talk virtually about the status of Planet Four and the science behind it. Our own Talk moderator Andy Martin was in attendance and wrote a summary post about the day. My talk is online and you can find it below (the first 30-45 seconds is cut off but the rest of it is all there).
Exploring More With the Images on Planet Four
We’ve added some new features in the past few months, to help make it easier for you to further explore the HiRISE images that you’re classifying on http://www.planetfour.org, and I thought I’d spend a blog post highlighting them. The full HiRISE frames are quite large (typically 2024 pixels in width and 20,000 pixels in height) and to show on the main site we divide them into smaller overlapping cutouts that we ask you to mark fans and blotches in. For each cutout, you can use our discussion Tool (Planet Four Talk), to talk about interesting features you’re seeing, and it is through Talk that can you access the site’s new features.
After you’ve marked the fans and blotches (if any) for the image presented on Planet Four and hit the ‘Finish’ button, you’ll see the ‘Next’ button and below it the ‘Discuss’ button appear. If you hit Discuss, it will take to you to the cutout’s dedicated page on Talk (Here’s an example for cutout APF0000zcd). This is where you can add 140 character comments about the image as well as start longer discussions about questions you have or thoughts and theories with other members of the Planet Four community and the science team.
Click on Discuss after hitting the Finnish button in the main interface and it will take you to the Talk page for this cutout
Talk page
While on the Talk specific page for the cutout, if you see a feature you want to examine in more detail, place your mouse over the image. We have added a magnifying glass tool that will appear on the right with a zoomed in version of the image (see below).
Magnifying glass feature in Talk. Move your mouse over the spot in the image you want to see enlarged
In addition, we’ve added links on Talk to the original HiRISE image (hosted on the HiRISE website) that the cutout you examined is derived from (for an example here’s the page for APF0000zcd). Click on the View HIRISE image link below the image on Talk. From there, you’ll be directed to the HiRISE website, where you can download the full frame observation (we currently use the RGB color non-map projected images) as well as find links to observations taken close to the area over the past 4 Martian monitoring seasons (just scroll to the bottom of the page).
HiRISE website page for full frame image that APF0000zcd is derived from
Bottom of HiRISE page with links to nearby observations
Don’t forget you can always explore Talk at any time by going to http://talk.planetfour.org/ and explore the discussions and images that other volunteers have recently classified or commented on.
Happy New 32 Year, Mars!
Dear Mars Explorers,
Today marks the start of a new Martian year. The Planet Four team wishes everyone a very Happy New Year!
That’s right, today July 31 2013 on Mars, Year 31 turns into New 32 Year. As a Martian year, (a complete 668 days around the Sun) is nearly twice longer than the Earth’s, it is a rather special event. Time to celebrate!
The counting of martian years started on April 11, 1955, this was the date of Ls=0 back in that time. Since then the moment when Mars completes its turn around the Sun shifted for us, Earthlings, from April to July. It will continue to shift further, because martian year is close but not precisely equal to 2 terrestrial years. To give you a perspective, Planet4 is 7 months old now, this means, only a bit older than a quarter of a martian year!
In contrast to Earth, New Year comes to Mars when northern hemisphere is in spring, and it is fall in southern hemisphere. For areas that you are analyzing this means rather boring time: all the ices are gone from the surface and the ground stands bare and inactive. But even inactive, the scenery is still very impressive. For the New Year celebration we decided to share with you a glimpse into a very fresh HiRISE image. It was taken only a week ago. Some of you might recall the area you were studying! Now there are only dim reminders of the fans that you are marking for us so efficiently.
Thank you for doing it with us and lets celebrate by classifying an image or two! Happy New Year!
ZooCon 13
Today we have a guest post from Andy Martin, one of our dedicated Planet Four Talk moderators, who attended ZooCon13 in Oxford, UK this past weekend. In a previous life as a chartered chemist, Andy tested the air at the House of Commons, assessed the quality of food, water and nuclear fuel testing, and worked on standards for breathalysers and dairy farm milking parlours. He now runs a campsite in Cornwall where there are lots more stars to stargaze at in the night sky than there were inside the M25.
And so to Oxford. Walking to the venue was a little like being outside Ikea on a Sunday afternoon. The streets were littered with parents come to transport their student offspring home for the summer, only to find they’d accumulated too much stuff to fit in the car – in one case three cars!
I’m not sure that anyone counted heads but there were around 40 delegates present with large contingents from Planet Hunters and Old Weather (some of who brought cakes). It has been a while since I was audience side of the lectern and I quickly found that I now have an ocular choice, see the presentation screen or read what I’m writing. I chose the former and thus my limitations with the latter takes the blame for any errors, omissions or inaccuracies in what follows.
The afternoon started with presentation by Aprajita Verma on the Space Warps project which looks for examples of gravitational lensing. In the simple version of this you have a star a long way off with another star in between. Instead of being obscured by the intervening star the light from the distant one gets bent around it to give two (or more) images around the middle star. In practice they are mainly looking at galaxies and the images are somewhat more complicated than the simple model would suggest. All very interesting, but why, you might ask and this is where all gets very technical. In essence these objects allow an estimate of the mass of the lensing object to be made – its a way of weighing galaxies.
The project has been very successful, 2 million images in the first week, and has around 80000 participants around 40% of which remain active. As I said the things they are looking for are very rare but the image set contains a number of control images. When you get one of these and flag the feature, up pops a little “well done” window with some information about the type of lens you just found.
Karen Masters from the University of Portsmouth gave the next presentation, highlighting some of the scientific highlights of the Galaxy Zoo project so far. Galaxy Zoo has been running since 2007, there are 200 thousand participants and to date some 40 million images have been classified. Participants are asked to locate galaxies in the images they are presented with and decide which characteristic group they belong to.
Galaxy Zoo has seen a number of published papers and scientific discoveries perhaps most celebrated being a strange object discovered amongst the images on Galaxy Zoo by a lady called Hanny who I had the pleasure of talking to later in the pub. Photos were duly taken of my amazement when she showed me her Voorwerp.
The next presentation brought us back to Earth, Phil Brohan from the Met Office gave an insight into the Old Weather project. This involves the transcription of archived ships logs from a hundred or more years ago. The logs contain details of position, pressure, temperature, wind speed/direction, extent of sea ice and more, enabling a picture to be built up of weather systems in the past. Each log contains readings taken several times a day and the archive includes logs from more than a thousand ships. This picture of historic weather can be used to compare the weather today with the past and may help to answer the question “has the weather changed?”. As an example the recent ‘super storm’ Nemo which hit the North East USA had similar weather patterns to the great blizzard of 1880 which affected the same area.
As well as the weather data the ships logs also contain information of the voyages of the vessels concerned and details of the people on them. The logs are transcribed from start to finish by the same person enabling them to follow the story of the ship and its crew. The current task is to transcribe records from the US archive which contains 75 million pages, and work is underway to include more archives in the future.
Back then to the GalaxyZoo and Brook Simmons from Oxford University who gave a taste of what the future holds for the project. The next phase will look at images taken in the infrared which will enable images from further away, and thus older, to be looked at. Current images from the Hubble telescope are able to show objects back to around half the age of the universe, the new set of images will push that back to cover around 80% of the age of the universe.
There are plans to provide online tools to make it easier to examine and work with the data and to enable more collaboration between individuals.
Following a short tea/coffee/beer we regrouped to hear from Meg Schwamb via webcam from the USA. Meg gave an update on progress with Planet Four so far and gave a tantalising glimpse of some of the first results from the analysis of the data so far; Plotting of fan/blotch position onto the surface on a larger scale.
Left image: Volunteer marks overplotted. Red crosses are centers for blotches marked by Planet Four volunteers. Blue Circles are starting points of fans marked by Planet Four volunteers. Right image: Same as left but without volunteer classifications drawn
Meg mentioned the plans to look at the North in the future and discussed some of the differences that are observed between the two poles. She also showed part of this video of fan formation in the North:
Back to Earth again for the next item entitled “Only you can save planet Earth” and detailing the work of Solar Stormwatch. This project is concerned with looking at data from two cameras, one positioned slightly ahead of the earths orbit and one slightly behind which give a stereo image of the material ejected in solar mass ejections. The data from the cameras in can be combined to give an estimate of the direction and speed of the ejections and enable an early warning to be given of any activity which is headed our way. As you all probably know solar storms of this type can affect electronics, satellite communications and even the weather so any prior knowledge is of great use. The project looks at both historical data and live real time data. The historic data provides a much fuller data set than the live data but it is the patchy data in real time, which is being analysed round the clock by the people involved with the project, which can give an advanced warning of an incoming storm. Part of the presentation was a video from the cameras which shows the effect of a mass ejection on a comet, the tail is literally ripped away as the ejection front passes.
Chris Lintott was next up to talk about Planet Hunters. My notes kinda dry up here so either I was swept away by his oration or I didn’t understand a word of it – all I managed to write down was that the first exoplanet was only discovered in 1995 and the rate and number of subsequent discoveries have led to a recent estimate that there may be as many as 17 billion earth sized planets in our galaxy.
Lack of notes notwithstanding the success of the Planet Hunters project in identifying new candidates for exoplanets was clear from Chris’ presentation and particularly in finding things which have been overlooked by computers previously. Part of the current data are a set of images which are felt to contain the best bets for exoplanets – the message being if you want to find a planet now’s the time to go look.
Many of the systems found to date are somewhat strange by comparison to our home system with many systems containing 2, 3 or 4 suns, and planets of similar sizes to those in our solar system have been identified including a many which fall into the category of “Earth like”, at least so far as size goes.
The bad news is that the Kepler spacecraft which has provided much of the data for the project is now on its last legs. The good news is that another space mission is planned, there is still a huge amount of data from Kepler to be examined and other teams looking for exoplanets are keen to harness the power of the Zooniverse.
To finish the day Rob Simpson gave us a snapshot of what the future holds for the Zooniverse. He started by comparing the billions of hours spent watching TV with the 100 million hours that Wikipedia has taken to put together. The TV box filled the screen, Wikipedia just a small box by the side. By comparison Zooniverse currently attracts 2 months of effort every day, small by comparison but how much better do you all feel for it?
This image below shows the relative ‘size’ of the various Zooniverse projects over the past year. Rob has recently written a post for the Zooniverse blog about how the human effort for the last year is divided by project and how he calculated it.
Image Credit: Rob Simpson/Zooniverse
Rob mentioned Snapshot Serengeti which provides BushCam images for you to identify the animals in view and what they are up to. This project has been very popular and from the quick visit I’ve made since returning from Oxford I can see how it could be almost as addictive as marking fans on Planet Four.
With the ‘formal’ part of ZooCon13 at an end we all retired to the nearest hostelry where, overlooked by a large oil painting of Patrick Moore, the workings of the universe were discussed long into the evening. My first ZooCon and hopefully not my last, everyone I met and talked to was friendly and keen to chat about all the workings of Zooniverse. Many have been coming to ZooCon for several years and it’s clear that many firm friendships have resulted. It was a pleasure to meet all of you and my thanks for the warm welcome to the fold you all gave me.
6 Months of Planet Four
To celebrate Planet Four turning 6 months old and thank you for all of your hard work, we’ve made this poster [21 MB download] (and smaller resolution version 6.5 MB) containing the names* of the more than 72,000 volunteers who have contributed to Planet Four! We hope you enjoy it, and that you are able to find your name in amongst the many that make up this HiRISE image of dark fans and spiders (You can find the original image here). Here’s to the next 6 months!
*Names are only shown for volunteers who gave permission for us to show their name on the Zooniverse account settings. To update your settings login to https://www.zooniverse.org/account and update the ‘name’ field.
New Link for the Live Chat
Some technical difficulties but we are live
Planet Four Blog 
