Oral Presentation

Investigating the Martian South Polar Seasonal Fan Deposits with Planet Four

M. E. Schwamb (ASIAA) & Planet Four Team

During the summer on the South Pole of Mars, carbon dioxide geysers loft dust and dirt through cracks in the thawing carbon dioxide ice sheet to the surface where it is believed the surface winds subsequently sculpt the material into the hundreds of thousands of dark fans and blotches observed from orbit. It is difficult if not impossible for computer algorithms to accurately identify individual fans and blotches that are easily spotted by eye. Planet Four (http://www.planetfour.org), part of the Zooniverse's (http://www.zooniverse.org) collection of citizen science projects, launched in January 2013, enlists over 100,000 citizen scientists to examine high-resolution images, from the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and map the sizes, shapes, and orientations of these features. Citizen science or crowdsourcing is the combined assessment of many non-expert human classifiers and with minimal training can often equal or best that of a trained expert and in many cases outperform the best machine-learning algorithm. Planet Four is creating an unprecedented data set and will produce a seasonal wind map of the South Pole of Mars. These maps will reveal how the Martian climate changes over time and is impacted year to year by dust storms and other global-scale events. I will introduce the project and present preliminary results from Seasons 2 and 3 of the HiRISE monitoring campaign.