Clickworkers for HiRISE

The HiRISE camera, one of the instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, has been sending back high-resolution images of Mars since late 2006. On this site, you can help us identify landforms in these images. You can also call attention to interesting features in images taken from a previous orbiter. These might be considered as places to aim HiRISE in the future.

The HiRISE task that you can get started on right now is a landform search. We could use volunteers to sift through images looking for sand dunes, run through images looking for channels, pore through images looking for gullies, and more. (Unlike the crater marking task we did as a pilot study , the goal for now is just to locate the features, not measure them. We're still thinking about the best way to reduce each of these new landform types to a few numbers.)

1. Help direct scientists to the features that interest them — catalog HiRISE images.
   HiRISE images are huge! A single image, zoomed in all the way, is more than ten computer screens wide and high. It would take a person a long time to systematically examine those 100 screens completely at full detail, even ignoring the significant time it would take to download a full image. Although it's possible for a scientist or other person to zoom in to areas that look promising (you can do that using the HiRISE online image viewer if you're curious), that will tend to overlook small features that appear in unexpected places, and those would be interesting to know about. With enough volunteers, a systematic inspection of the images at all scales may be possible.
   → Click here to start cataloging HiRISE images.
2. Help find new places on Mars for HiRISE to take pictures — search MOC images for landforms of interest.
   Mars Global Surveyor operated for over 9 years, and its camera, MOC, returned almost a quarter of a million images. You can look through these to identify areas that contain landforms that are of particular interest to scientists on the HiRISE team. This may help guide the selection of future locations for HiRISE to image. Also, if while looking for those landforms, you happen see an area that you personally would like to see imaged, by HiRISE, you can suggest that too. (We will collect these requests and decide later how to filter them, since we expect more requests than HiRISE can handle.)
   Note: We will show you whole MOC images, and while they're not as large as HiRISE images, they're very large.
   → Click here to start looking for promising locations.
Virginia Gulick, HiRISE Education and Public Outreach lead
Bob Kanefsky, clickworkers web developer