6 Earth Years of Planet Four
Happy Birthday Planet Four. This month marks 6 years of Planet Four. We couldn’t do any of this without the Planet Four volunteer community. Thank you for all of your help and contributions. We hope you’re celebrating with a slice of cake or a serving of Mars pie. The team is really excited for what’s to come next. We’re working hard on follow-up papers to the first fan and blotch catalog release. We’re also starting preparations to move the project to the Zooniverse’s newer Project Builder Platform. We’ll keep you posted on all of these efforts right here on the blog. Lots more to come in 2019!
Planet Four Talk at the Division for Planetary Sciences
Greetings from Knoxville, Tennessee. Earlier this morning, I presented our first catalog and early results from comparing the fan directions over two Mars years at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science meeting. Here’s my slides.
New Meridiani Images on Planet Four: Ridges
After a hiatus, Planet Four: Ridges is back! We’ve get the second batch of Meridiani ridges search images live on the site. We’re finding from the analysis of the previous search classifications for regular polygonal ridges, that Planet Four: Ridges volunteers can identify polygonal ridges smaller than contained in previous catalogs. We expect the project can do the same for Meridiani ridges. Dive in today at https;//ridges.planetfour.org and classify an image or two.
Planet Four: Terrains Tutorial
You might have noticed that in July we added a tutorial to Planet Four: Terrains. After some changes to the front-end part of the Zooniverse platform, the team decided to add the tutorial. You’ll find it on the tab next to ‘Task’. There should be some new examples to help guide you while classifying. If you were a fan of the original help button and Spotter’s guide, don’t worry those are still available as well.
We’re in the middle of going through a new suite of images on the site. Dive in and check out the new tutorial and classify a few images today at http://terrains.planetfour.org.
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 !
New Images on Planet Four: Terrains
We’ve uploaded new images to Planet Four: Terrains this week. This dataset continues to fill in areal coverage to look for spiders outside of the south polar layered deposits and also examining the overall distribution of spiders and other features.
You’ll notice some changes to the look of the classification interface. Over the past several months, the Zooniverse development team has made updates and changes to the classification pages. This Zooniverse Talk thread is where you can share your thoughts and feedback on the new look.
Dive in today a http://terrains.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!
First publication submitted!
We have finally submitted our first paper for the original Planet Four project to the Icarus journal where it is now officially “Under Review”!
(Above figure is one of the paper where we demonstrate one of the reduction steps to identify noise and create averaged clustered markings. I think it demonstrates well the power of our chosen methodology.)
Thank you to everyone to stay with us for so long without seeing any published results, but I think when you will see the work and care that we put into it, you will understand why it took us so long. One of the reasons was, as we possible mentioned before on this blog, that our Zooniverse project is actually one of the most difficult ones, where we ask all of you to precisely mark objects in the data presented to you. This required a spatial clustering pipeline with a long evaluation and fine-tuning phase.
Which brings me to the point of “see[ing] the work”: we have now managed to have the submitted preprint published on the well known arxiv.org preprint server and you can get your hands on a copy right now! Just click on this link and you will be sent to the arXiv page for our preprint:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10341
Enjoy the (long!) read and don’t shy away to put any questions you have in the comments section below!
South Polar Locales Comprising the First Planet Four Catalog
The science team is working on ticking off the last things on the todo list before we can submit the first Planet Four paper. Michael is in the last stages of making edits and changes to the paper draft. We’re nearly over the finish line. While Michael has been working hard on the manuscript text and catalog files, we’ve also been iterating on some changes to the figure Anya made that shows all the locations making up the Seasons 2 and 3 monitoring campaign that are part of our fan and blotch catalogs based on your classifications. I thought I would share some of the versions Anya made:
All the locations monitored by HiRISE that were classified by Planet Four volunteers to make the Season 2 and 3 catalog. Credit: G. Portyankina
All the locations monitored by HiRISE that were classified by Planet Four volunteers to make the Season 2 and 3 catalog. A labeled version (for clarity a few regions don’t have their names listed). We note all of these names are unofficial nicknames and are not IAU approved. Credit: G. Portyankina
It’s really exciting to think back to when this project started in 2013 and now see this plot, where I can say we have fan and blotch identifications for HiRISE images taken in Season 2 and 3 Southern Spring/Summer for all of these plotted points.
One (Earth) Year of Planet Four: Ridges
Today we have a guest blog by JPL research scientist Laura Kerber, our lead researcher on Planet Four: Ridges. Laura studies physical volcanology, aeolian geomorphology, wind over complex surfaces, and the ancient Martian climate.
Dear Ridge Hunters,
Can you believe that it has been a year since we started to hunt for ridges??? We have accomplished a great deal in the space of a year! With 7,784 volunteers, we have made 135,976 classifications! We finished our first region (parts of Deuteronilus Mensae), second region (Protonilus Mensae) and third region (Nili Fossae)! We are now working on our fourth batch of images—from a new region in Meridiani Planum, closer to the currently operating Opportunity rover. Mapping our first three regions allowed us to understand the distribution of Nili-like ridges close to two of the Mars2020 rover candidate landing sites, and allowed us to see what sorts of geologic units were associated with the ridges. We found out that the ridge-bearing units are often buried units, and that polygonal ridges were almost never found in glacial terrain. There also wasn’t a strong correlation between craters and ridge networks. There was a strong correlation, however, between ridge units and ancient terrain from Mars’ oldest geological period, the Noachian. As its name suggests, the Noachian was a time when water was abundant on the surface of Mars. Our ridge discoveries suggest that the subsurface was also the site of extensive water-related processes. Since the subsurface would have also been protected from harmful UV rays, this watery environment could have been an interesting place to foster life.
Here is a map showing the ridges that were known before this project (green) and the enormous number of ridges in fine detail that we mapped throughout Nili Fossae (red):
But wait! There’s more! Intrepid ridge-hunter @bluemagi ventured outside of the Zooniverse-defined regions and is currently conducting a planet-wide search for more ridge-bearing regions. Here’s a map of the simply astonishing findings of @bluemagi across the rest of the planet (added in blue), which were transformed into an amazing .kmz file for Google Earth by @frognal! Check out their handiwork here and see if you agree with @bluemagi’s interpretations!
Thanks everyone, for a year full of amazing surprises in Planet Four: Ridges. Here’s to another year of exploring the planet Mars together!
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