Final Push on Planet Four and Planet Four’s Future

We were formally informed this week by the Zooniverse, that the platform that Planet Four is hosted on will be retired and shutdown very soon. On April 30th, the platform will be shutdown. This means that the site will be on hiatus as the science team continues to work towards building a new version of the project on the Zooniverse’s project builder platform.  This is going to take several months to complete, but in the meantime we are also analyzing your classifications and the Season 2 and 3 fan and blotch catalog. The science team has papers in the works and have been exploring possibilities/synergies with machine learning as well.

Planet Four’s future is bright.  April 30th  won’t be the end of Planet Four. We’ll be back. For at least the time being Planet Four Talk will be accessible and you can login and continue to make posts. Some point in the future, Planet Four Talk will become read only. Rest assured, your comments, hastags, and collections are stored in the Planet Four Talk database, so that information is saved and accessible to the science team for further investigation.  We’ll keep you updated here on the blog.

Before we pause Planet Four, we need your help! We still have data on the site left to be classified. We believe we have found a connection between regional dust storms on Mars and the number of seasonal fans and blotches visible in a given spring season. To check whether or not these storms are playing a significant role, new images are live on the Planet Four website. We are hoping we can get as many images classified as possible before the site goes on hiatus.

Time is running out, and we need your help to get as many of these images classified before the old Zooniverse platform is retired on April 30th. If everyone classified 10 images, we’d be over the finish line. If you can spare a minute or two, please review images at http://www.planetfour.org.