Collaborators Needed

Next week, there won't be my usual update about what happened with the students. Instead of meeting with them I'll be at the AGU conference. Normal weekly updates will resume the week of Dec 11th.

At the AGU conference, I'll be presenting a poster (ED31C-1225) on Wednesday morning. Most of my poster describes the project that, if you've been reading the blog, sounds very familar. The poster also goes into the kinds of collaborations I'm looking for. Since I haven't covered that on the blog before, I'll do it now.

The most important ideas are suggestions for student or amateur projects. Specifically, what might they do? Projects can last from a person-hour to several person-months. Requiring a less extensive background in planetary geology from the user is good, but not necessary.

All the projects currently planned for the students have them basically identifying features (wind streaks, rivers, chaos and rampart craters). What other features might they survey the Martian globe for. Perhaps more importantly, what can they do beyond simply identifying a feature? Are there properties of a feature they could measure and compute some interesting result?

PEP downloads THEMIS images with a single menu selection. It is a great and ever changing data set. However, there aren't any projects relying THEMIS images yet. Are there some small, interesting features students could study?

PEP intergates several sensor data sets such as thermal inertia, albedo, gravity variation and a mineral map. The user can simply load in other data sets and they are integrated into both the map and 3D views. But, none of these data sets are used. What might students do with these data sets?

PEP ships with Mars data but it isn't limited to Mars. Since it reads in PDS formatted files it deals with most NASA data sets. I've used it extensively with Magellan Venus data and Clementine Moon data. So, what projects make sense for these worlds?

Are there old research projects students might enjoy repeating? I can go back through old issues of the JGR looking for ideas but would much prefer some informed suggestions!

Could a dozen or a hundered volunteers be put to good use? Both bird watchers and amateur astronomers make valuable contributions to the scientific community. Is it possible to build a similar non-professional community to collaborate with planetary scientists? Now that students and amatures can look at the same data as scientists, is there something useful for them to do?

Finally, what features should be added to PEP to help people do more useful work? Is it support for specific data sets? Are there some mathematical models that should be added? Are there existing mathematical models that should be intergrated into PEP?

Comments on any of the above issues are most welcome. Feel free to add a comment to this post or email me at Steve@SiliconSpaceships.com. Thanks.