Hi! Thank you all for participating in the Cloudspotting on Mars citizen science project. On October 29, 2024, we launched a new branch of the project that runs in parallel to the identification of clouds in limb imagery of the Mars Climate Sounder on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In Cloudspotting on Mars: Shapes, participants have the opportunity to map clouds and mark their types in imagery of the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph on the MAVEN orbiter. Please check it out.

Can you believe it’s been six months since the project launched already?!

Hi everyone,

Wow! I was really taken aback by the number of people that participated in the project from the get-go. Over 2000 classifications were made in just several hours, 7000 just twelve hours in, and over 15,000 on the second day. After those first few days over 1000 registered Zooniverse users had participated (not all participants register for a Zooniverse account, you can navigate to a project and immediately start classifying). On the third day, the entire first set of data (I’ll explain more about the subject sets later in the post) had been retired! We require 20 participants to classify each subject (a subject is just one image that you look for arches in, each subject has four frames that you search through) before it is retired and that set contained 2112 subjects, which means we were over 42,000 classifications in only a few days. Not to mention the activity on the Talk board – several hundred comments during the first few days of volunteers saying hello, asking questions about Mars, and discussing the details of specific images.

Welcome! The Cloudspotting on Mars project offically launches today! If you’re intersted in searching the Martian sky for clouds, check out the project on the Zooniverse.