Mars is full of secrets and mysteries. No matter how many feats NASA manages to accomplish on the Red Planet, new secrets always seem to be just around the corner. Now, NASA is asking members of the public to help solve the Mars mystery that has baffled the space agency for decades.
You can help NASA solve this Mars mystery
NASA recently came to the conclusion that they need to dig deeper Looking for signs of ancient life on Mars. But what the Red Planet can tell us doesn’t stop there. There’s still a lot we don’t understand about Mars. The mystery that NASA hopes to solve.
On Tuesday, NASA shared Surat Asking community members to join the new site Cloudspotting on the Mars project. This project is the first planetary science project to be funded using NASA’s Citizen Science Seed Funding Program. With help from around the world, NASA hopes to solve a Mars mystery that has long puzzled scientists: What causes clouds to form on Mars?
But how can you help solve this Martian mystery? Well, NASA has collected more than 16 years of data that it collects Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). He has made this data publicly available on the citizen science platform Zooniverse. Basically, he needed the public to help him research the data captured by the MRO.
What is NASA looking for?
Infrared imaging captures data in the infrared, the spectrum of light that is invisible to the human eye. With instruments on MRO and other spacecraft, we can see through that spectrum. NASA wants the public to look for signs of cloud in the infrared that the MRO picks up from the Martian atmosphere. Finding these clouds, which look like arcs in the MRO data, could help solve a long-standing mystery of Mars.
Many believe that Mars was once a habitable planet. Our neighbor’s dusty surface is now covered in lakes and rivers. NASA Agency Curiosity investigators have found the stone which seems to support this belief. Now, liquid water simply evaporates on the planet’s surface and enters the thin atmosphere. But how and when clouds form remains a mystery on Mars.
NASA says there are two types of clouds that form on Mars. The first is water-ice clouds, like the ones we see on Earth. The second type is made of carbon dioxide, like dry ice. They form when the weather gets cold enough to freeze clouds. The space agency changed its algorithm for detecting clouds. But he says relying on humans to identify them by eye is much easier.
The hope is that NASA can find out where and when clouds form. If possible, the space agency hopes to better understand the planet’s central atmosphere. In addition, it could open up important clues for understanding how Mars’ atmosphere became so thin. All in all, this will help NASA solve one of the longest-lived Martian mysteries we’ve encountered so far.
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