NASA scientists are trying to solve a mystery about Mars’ atmosphere, and now they want the help of the public
The ‘Cloud Spotting on Mars’ project want members of the public to help identify Martian clouds.
NASA is urging people to use the ‘Zooniverse’ online program to solve the Mars mystery.
“We want to learn what triggers the formation of clouds—especially water ice clouds, which could teach us how high water vapor gets in the atmosphere—and during which seasons,”
Marek Slipski, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA believes the information may help researchers work out why the planet’s atmosphere is 1 per cent as dense as Earth’s.
There is already a stack of evidence to suggest the red planet was once covered by lakes and rivers, which means would mean the atmosphere would have been much thicker.
“We now have over 16 years of data for us to search through, which is very valuable—it lets us see how temperatures and clouds change over different seasons and from year to year,” said Armin Kleinboehl, who is a Mars Climate Sounder’s deputy principal investigator at JPL.
Despite this, Kleinboehl concedes “it’s a lot of data for a small team to look through”.
NASA wants people to help search and mark clouds that appear on a high-altitude.
The program also offers webinars in which participants can hear from scientists about how the data will be used.
