NASA needs your help to solve a fundamental mystery about Mars’ atmosphere

NASA is inviting the public to help find clouds on Mars using the citizen science platform Zooniverse. By identifying clouds in data collected by the agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a spacecraft which has been studying Mars since 2006, the public can increase scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet's atmosphere.

Mars has both water-ice and carbon-dioxide-ice clouds. By understanding where and how these clouds appear, scientists hope to better understand the structure of the planet's middle atmosphere.

MRO's Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) instrument peers at the horizon of the planet in infrared light to measure the temperature, water-ice, and dust content of the atmosphere on the planet. Because clouds emit in the infrared, they stand out with respect to the empty sky. In measurements taken by the instrument, clouds appear as arches.

As the spacecraft moves through its orbit, clouds appear to rise from behind the atmosphere to a higher altitude and then fall again. This leads to an arch-like shape in the data. The peak of the arch is the real location of the cloud, according to NASA.

The Cloudspotting on Mars Citizen Science Project asks members of the public to look for such arches in data collected by MRO and help scientists study where in the atmosphere they occur.

"We want to learn what triggers the formation of clouds – especially water ice clouds, which could teach us how high water vapour gets in the atmosphere – and during which seasons," said Marek Slipski, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Help @nasa scientists find clouds on Mars! We're asking citizen scientists to help us identify clouds in Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data. This may aid researchers in figuring out why the Red Planet’s atmosphere is just 1% as dense as Earth’s. Join here: https://t.co/Bk96EMIm1H pic.twitter.com/E5EnDRc1R6

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) June 29, 2022