Mars for everyone

By creating a new citizen science website called Planet Four, researchers are turning to the public to help analyze the surface images of Mars. Many of them have never been published before. Scientists hope that with the input data, the public will help develop a detailed picture of the wind on the red planet.

These images were taken by HiRISE scientific equipment mounted on the Mars probe to fly around the red planet orbit managed by NASA, and are limited to the southernmost region of Mars (to facilitate research and management). workload management).

The task at hand is to detect and mark 'fan' (wind direction) and 'blobches' (blobs). The popular hypothesis is that during the fall, Mars has a layer of carbon dioxide ice created at the South Pole. When spring comes, sunlight penetrates the ice (this ice has been blurred in winter), heating the ground below, making the ice sublimation (moving from solid state to gas) from below. . With the accumulation of increasing pressure gas and the strip of ice below thinning, there will definitely be ice cracks. Then the gas erupts from the crack as the injection circuit where the material surface loosely links to them.

By using the fan tool and blob buttons from the command menu, visitors to the Planet Four website can mark these special features by clicking the mouse cursor on the image position displayed. Similarly, everyone can mark other unusual, remarkable points. These images will be delivered to the website discussion section where scientists and amateurs seek to explain them.

According to Gizmag magazine, Planet Four is part of Zooniverse, the family of citizen science websites. The website quickly received enthusiastic support from surfers. By the middle of January 2013, there were 57,299 volunteers around the world participating in classification, marking 2,891,510 images.

Planet Four website is always open to welcome people at http://planetfour.org.