Planetary Research with Citizen Science

Michael Aye

2022-10-27

What is Citizen Science (CS)?

Political answer (Quotes EU Horizon monthly focus)

• “Through citizen science, ordinary people can take part in extraordinary research.”
• “Through their contributions, the citizen scientist can actively pursue personal values, and be part of a research community seeking the same goals.”
• “The professional scientist can get more data than they would otherwise. This leads to better precision in their measurements and more lines of enquiry in their research.”

• “Environmental monitoring is a particularly active field of citizen science.”
• “Scientists naturally want to measure the effects of citizen science and its impact on society […]” (Meta-CS)

What is CS, practically?

• Problem: Simple, but arduous or repetitive task
  • too much data to go through yourself
• Split up the task into screen-sized subtasks
• Present the data with a simple workflow to thousands of untrained volunteers

What is in it for scientists?

• amount of data grows exponentially
• ideal for simple but arduous questions
• ML: labeled data always better
• CS is an efficient way to create many labels
• good outreach opportunity

What is in it for citizens?

• participate in real science
• independent of prior education!
• wide variety of research fields offered as CS now

Recognition of the field (US)

• https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience
• Seed funding available through standard NASA funding programs
• Can be attached to larger project applications

Recognition of the field (EU)

EU Horizon monthly focus and semi-regularly CS news

https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/citizen-science-science-and-people

How did it start (really)

• Zooniverse really took off with “GalaxyZoo”
• Dozens of papers before planetary even started
• Galaxy shape distributions needed
  redefinition!

Planet Four project

Science case

Science case temporal

Science case: Kieffer model

• Jet deposits are aligned by prevalent winds at the time!
• Mapping these features would be more wind data than we ever had on Mars!

Active areas around south pole

• Seasonal campaigns at most of these areas!
  • -> Lots of huge HiRISE image data

Input data

• 221 HiRISE images from MY 29/30
• split up into over 40,000 image screen-sized tiles
• Tiles are being “anonymized”, to prevent bias
• The data input and reduction pipelines need to track everything

Interface

Interface return

Difficulty: What (contrast) defines the “end” of a surface feature?

Minimum of 30 different volunteers per image tile!

=> quite slow progress

Reduction pipeline

Comprehensive description in Aye et al. (2019) : “Planet Four: Probing springtime winds on Mars by mapping the southern polar CO2 jet deposits”

Reduction pipeline 2

Clockwise from upper left: 1) Raw, 2) Fan markings, 3) Blotch markings, 4) Blotch reduction, 5) Fan reduction, 6) catalog entry with 50% majority vote

Catalog entries

Science Team (Gold) markings

• Each team member marked several hundred tiles
• Significant differences between science team members
• Years of experience do not overcome the original contrast problem!

Compare experts with citizens

Results

• Over 40,000 citizens have contributed
  • Most only once
  • Core team of approx 10-20 volunteers did most of the work
• ca. 400,000 geo-located objects in catalog
• available at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mschwamb/planet-four/about/results

What can be done with it?

Portyankina et al. (2022) “Planet Four: Derived South Polar Martian Winds Interpreted Using Mesoscale Modeling”

Compare with climate models

• Team member Tim Michaels nest GCM into high-res meso-scale models using CTX and HiRISE DTM topography
• Run for several days to avoid “spin-up” effects
• Run at different \(L_s\) over the season
• Compare wind predictions with Planet Four data
• Just published in Portyankina et al. (2022)

Measure of success

• Define status of good / average / bad fit with data
• Using only direction very good match with climate models
• Taking into account wind strength as well less good
• Our assumptions for jet deposit <-> wind strength are too simple

Only wind directions

Wind directions and estimated strengths

Conclusions

• Citizen Science is not only outreach
• Scientific paradigms are being changed thanks to the work power of hundred thousands of citizen scientists all over the world
• If data reduction is done carefully, the results are very reliable
• Don’t try to do this “on the side”
  • It’s a full time analytical job

Conclusions 2

• Overall good match with models but discrepancies exist
• Hope to derive jet eruption times

References

Aye, K-Michael, Megan E Schwamb, Ganna Portyankina, Candice J Hansen, Adam McMaster, Grant R M Miller, Brian Carstensen, et al. 2019. “Planet Four: Probing Springtime Winds on Mars by Mapping the Southern Polar CO2 Jet Deposits.” Icarus 319 (February): 558–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2018.08.018.

Portyankina, Ganna, Timothy I Michaels, Klaus-Michael Aye, Megan E Schwamb, Candice J Hansen, and Chris J Lintott. 2022. “Planet Four: Derived South Polar Martian Winds Interpreted Using Mesoscale Modeling.” Planet. Sci. J. 3 (2): 31. https://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/ac3087.