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By identifying clouds in data collected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the public can increase scientists' understanding of the Red Planet's atmosphere:

NASA scientists hope to solve a fundamental mystery about Mars' atmosphere, and you can help. They've organized a project called Cloudspotting on Mars that invites the public to identify Martian clouds using the citizen science platform Zooniverse. The information may help researchers figure out why the planet's atmosphere is just 1% as dense as Earth's even though ample evidence suggests the planet used to have a much thicker atmosphere.

The air pressure is so low that liquid water simply vaporizes from the planet's surface into the atmosphere. But billions of years ago, lakes and rivers covered Mars, suggesting the atmosphere must have been thicker then.

[...] "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," said Marek Slipski, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

That's where Cloudspotting on Mars comes in. The project revolves around a 16-year record of data from the agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been studying the Red Planet since 2006. The spacecraft's Mars Climate Sounder instrument studies the atmosphere in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. In measurements taken by the instrument as MRO orbits Mars, clouds appear as arches. The team needs help sifting through that data on Zooniverse, marking the arches so that the scientists can more efficiently study where in the atmosphere they occur.

[...] While scientists have experimented with algorithms to identify the arches in Mars Climate Sounder data, it's much easier for humans to spot them by eye. But Kleinboehl said the Cloudspotting project may also help train better algorithms that could do this work in the future. In addition, the project includes occasional webinars in which participants can hear from scientists about how the data will be used.

Cloudspotting on Mars is the first planetary science project to be funded by NASA's Citizen Science Seed Funding program. The project is conducted in collaboration with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. For more NASA citizen science opportunities, go to science.nasa.gov/citizenscience.

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