JacksMars: June 2020

Crowd-sourcing Mars

NASA has invited the public to help in exploring Mars, according to Digital Trends.

The space agency recently unveiled an online tool that would allow any person to classify different types of Mars terrain, in order to help driving rovers navigate around the red planet.

Scientists at NASA use an algorithm called SPOC (Soil Property and Object Classification) to label the topography on the planet’s uncharted surface.

The problem is that there’s so much data to train the algorithm that it requires a lot of time for researchers – who are also helping the Curiosity rover navigate on Martian soil.

They are now asking the public to offer support and knowledge in training the algorithm using the online AI4Mars tool so it can better recognize different parts of the planet’s terrain.

The tool can be used to draw boundaries and label objects around Mars’ terrain as sand, soil, bedrock or big rocks.

“In the future, we hope this algorithm can become accurate enough to do other useful tasks, like predicting how likely a rover’s wheels are to slip on different surfaces,” said Hiro Ono of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Click here to become a cartographer.