ClickWorkers was a small

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

experimental project that uses public

volunteer Volunteering is a voluntary act of an individual or group freely giving time and labor for community service. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others serve ...

s (nicknamed "clickworkers" on the site) for scientific tasks. Clickworkers are able to work when, and for however long they choose, doing routine analysis that would normally require months of work by

scientist A scientist is a person who conducts scientific research to advance knowledge in an area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engaged in the philosoph ...

s or graduate students. The web site and database were created and maintained by one engineer, Bob Kanefsky, and advised by two scientists, Nadine Barlow and Virginia Gulick. The pilot study was sponsored by the NASA Ames Director's Discretionary Fund. As of March 31, 2020, the Clickworkers volunteer program appears to be defunct. None of the links to the program are functional, as of that date.

Identifying Martian craters

The original phase ran from November 2000 to September 2001, identifying and classifying the age of craters on Mars images from

Viking Orbiter The ''Viking'' program consisted of a pair of identical American space probes, ''Viking 1'' and ''Viking 2'', which landed on Mars in 1976. Each spacecraft was composed of two main parts: an orbiter designed to photograph the surface of Mars f ...

that had already been analyzed by NASA. The goal was to answer two meta-science questions: # Is the public ready, willing, and able to help science? # Does this new way of powering science analysis produce results that are just as good as the traditional way? In February 2001 clickworkers started processing new images from

Mars Global Surveyor ''Mars Global Surveyor'' (MGS) was an American robotic space probe developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and launched November 1996. MGS was a global mapping mission that examined the entire planet, from the ionosphere down through t ...

, surveying small craters never before cataloged. Clickworkers also searched Mars images for "honeycomb" terrain, although no further images were discovered and it is suspected that this is an illusory feature type. Their analysis might potentially be useful for scientists, although there are no specific plans for using it yet. , new beta tasks were up on the Clickworker site. This time workers were being asked to help catalog Mars landforms in one of two ways. In the first task, high resolution images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are displayed and the volunteers are to stamp areas on the image with appropriate landform types. The second task took a different approach and displayed wider field views from the older MOC camera on Mars Global Surveyor. The landforms on these wider views were then marked, and interesting features could be tagged for possible future hi-res imaging with HiRISE.

New site

In November 2009 it was announced that NASA has developed a new website to allow volunteer users to help in Martian mapping. The site "Be a Martian" went live on November 17, 2009, and allows users to either map features or count craters on Mars.BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | How to explore Mars and have fun
/ref> As of March 2020, the "Be a Martian" website appears to be defunct.

References

{{Reflist

External links

ClickWorkers (original site), now defunct
2000 in science 2000 software Astronomy software Human-based computation Citizen science NASA online Digital labor

Identifying Martian craters

New site

See also

References

External links