Planetary Scientists Need Your Help to Study the Climate on Mars
A group of scientists wants the crowd to help them study the weather on Mars. The research is beyond the capability of current computing so it is best carried out by people power. There are also far too many images for the scientists to go through on their own.
Planet Four is a new citizen science project that is asking the public to analyze hundreds of thousands of images of the Martian surface to identify characteristic features that will help planetary scientists better understand the climate of Mars.
Individuals have to find and mark ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ on the Martian surface from pictures that have been uploaded to the Planet Four website. By tracking these features over several years and noting how they form, evolve, disappear and reform researchers will be able to build up a detailed picture of weather patterns on the red planet.
Several volunteers will make markings on the same image and an average will be taken to give scientists the measurements they need for their studies.
At the time of writing this post more than two million images have been classified by 46, 214 participants.
What causes the fans and blotches to occur is unknown, but the best educated guess as well as insights into how they indicate wind direction and speed are explained here.
The pictures were taken by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Incentives
As well as being part of an important space science project, members of the crowd have another incentive. It is likely that they will be the first humans to see some of the areas of Mars that have been photographed.
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