NASA Is Crowdsourcing Cloud Research—On Mars Climate Analyze | MASSIVE AFFAIRS

Space fans around the world can help analyze data collected by the Mars Climate Sounder.

Source: Wired

AT THE END OF 2020, planetary scientist Marek Slipski found himself glued to his computer, poring over image after image of the Martian atmosphere: zooming in, adjusting the contrast, increasing the brightness, and experimenting with color.

Slipski was looking for clouds as a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He'd written an algorithm for the task, but it was producing inconclusive results, so he'd resorted to eyeballing the data instead.

This, however, quickly became overwhelming. Even in the small sample of data Slipski was looking at, there were numerous distinct cloud populations, each with its own height and brightness. "After a week, I was like, 'Okay, this is going to take a little longer,'" he recalls. "It would also be nice to have some assistance."

Fortunately, NASA had just issued a call for its Citizen Science Seed Funding Program, which allows space enthusiasts to participate in cutting-edge research. Slipski and Armin Kleinböhl, an atmospheric physicist at JPL, began working on a proposal right away.

Perhaps the crowd could help Slipski with what he had mostly been attempting on his own: identifying mesospheric clouds. These float between 50 and 80 kilometers above the surface and can be seen in data from the Mars Climate Sounder, an instrument orbiting the planet that measures the planet's atmospheric temperature, ice content, and dust content. "We were actually chosen as the only planetary proposal," Kleinböhl says. "I guess the stars—or the planets—aligned!"

After weeks of beta testing, the Cloudspotting on Mars project was released in late June on the Zooniverse, a platform that hosts hundreds of citizen projects. So far, approximately 2,600 volunteers have volunteered, introducing themselves on the forums ("I am ready to chase the clouds," a mechanic from France wrote) and delving into the climate sounder's maps of the atmosphere at various heights, locations, and times of day.

Because the data is viewed using a browser-embedded visualization tool that comes with a quick, optional tutorial, participants only need a computer and internet access to contribute.

The Cloudspotting team's five researchers hope that their work will shed light on Mars' global weather patterns and why its atmosphere is so thin compared to our own, as well as help them understand how liquid water, which was once present on Mars' surface, escaped into space.

"The climatology that we will get from the citizen science project will be much more comprehensive than what has been published so far," says Kleinböhl, the sounder's deputy principal investigator.

He's particularly curious about the processes that govern the formation of Martian clouds, which are made of either carbon dioxide (dry ice) or water ice.

"The CO2 clouds will tell us something about the structure and dynamics of the atmosphere, as well as the conditions that lead to very low temperatures," he says, referring to the fact that carbon dioxide condenses at a temperature that is typically colder than the Martian atmosphere.

"while the water ice clouds may tell us something about the presence of water vapor and the processes that may be responsible for transporting water vapor to these high altitudes," says the author.

The sounder is one of six instruments on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting Mars since 2006. It has nine channels, each tuned to a different wavelength of visible or infrared light, and can map heat radiating from Mars' surface up to 80 kilometers in the air.

While the sounder was not designed to study clouds, the mission scientists immediately noticed prominent, arch-like features in these heat maps that suggested their presence. These arches, they discovered, are caused by the changing angle between a cloud and the infrared sensors as the spacecraft moves through its orbit.

As the sounder approaches a cloud, the cloud appears higher in the sky to the sensors. The cloud appears closer to the ground as the sounder moves beyond it. (It's similar to how the sun appears to rise and set in an arch in our own sky as the Earth spins.) The peak of the arch, then, represents the true altitude of the cloud above the Martian surface.

Citizen scientists for the Cloudspotting project use a point-and-click tool to identify the peaks of any arches they find in the sounder's heat maps at various altitudes and times. Each image is presented in four frames (the original, and three others with varying contrast and brightness levels).

Users can also invert the color to identify arches that are especially faint. To account for human error—after all, there is some variation in what people consider an arch—the same image must be classified by 20 different users before it is marked complete.

Slipski and Kleinböhl initially uploaded about four and a half months' worth of images to the Cloudspotting website, estimating that it would take a few months for people to parse this batch of data. "However, we received an overwhelming response," Kleinböhl says.

"It was absolutely fantastic—much better than we had hoped." Citizen scientists examined over 6,000 images (more than 120,000 classifications) in just two weeks, finding three to four clouds per image on average.

Scientists have previously used the Zooniverse to classify space photos, digitize rainfall records, and other tasks. It's a useful approach for research that involves looking for features that are too hidden or complex for a computer to recognize.

"Over millennia, humans have evolved to be really good at pattern recognition and filtering out extraneous information," says Haverford College astronomer Karen Masters, the principal investigator of Galaxy Zoo, the project that led to the creation of the Zooniverse. "However, it's still relatively simple to fool a computer."

Working with the public, on the other hand, presents its own set of challenges, according to Masters, namely attracting and retaining participants. To maintain engagement, the Cloudspotting team remains active in the forums, troubleshooting, responding to interesting arch features discovered by others, and sparking debate about Mars science.

(One volunteer pondered how identifying the arches could aid future piloted missions in navigating the planet's atmosphere: "Flying into ice clouds is a no-no!") Slipski hosted a webinar on July 15 to introduce citizen scientists to the research team and each other.

The Cloudspotting team does not expect the volunteers to go through all of the data from the climate sounder, which was collected over an eight-year period on Mars. (That is approximately 16 Earth years.) Rather, after analyzing a few representative years, Slipski hopes to be able to use the cloud characterizations to train his algorithm to produce more reliable results.

Eventually, this would provide one of the most comprehensive, long-term datasets for scientists to learn about Mars' atmospheric past and present.

"Sixteen years of data," says Majd Mayyasi, a planetary scientist at Boston University who is not involved in the project. "It will undoubtedly inform not only the mesospheric community, but also the lower and upper atmospheric communities, about the properties of water and clouds and how they are linked."

" According to Mayyasi, who studies how water escapes the Martian ionosphere into space, clouds play a significant role in how water is transported from the surface to higher altitudes.

"That's been a really important part of Mars' atmosphere evolving from a warm and wet planet to the cold and dry one we see today," Slipski says.

The Cloudspotting team hopes to release preliminary results early next year with the help of citizen scientists. Once the entire dataset has been analyzed, they will be able to broaden their research to include a full characterization of cloud populations and climate patterns across the planet, as well as a detailed understanding of how dust, water vapor, and carbon dioxide move through the Martian sky.

But there's still a lot of data to go through between now and then. The Cloudspotting team released a second batch of images—about 12,000 images, or eight Earth months' worth—for people to continue classifying two weeks ago.

They expect the citizen science project to continue for the next two years, and the Mars Climate Sounder to continue sending data until the end of 2022. (or longer, if NASA decides to extend the mission). "I'm hoping for a few more Mars years, hopefully all the way to the end of the decade," Kleinböhl says, "to really establish a resolved, detailed climatology of the Martian atmosphere."

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