Citizen mapping of planetary images in a space museum: Finding possible recent activities on Mars

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K13890
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Geology
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: MIYAMOTO Hideaki 東京大学, 大学院工学系研究科(工学部), 教授 (00312992)
• Research Collaborator: HEMMI Ryodo 東京大学, 総合研究博物館, 特任研究員
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 火星 / 衝突クレーター / 活動度 / 市民マッピング / 博物館

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Current formation rate of craters is an essential information in estimating formational ages of recently geological activities. Because automatic identification of new craters is, at least currently, difficult, we performed “citizen mapping” of craters in a space museum, TeNQ, located the center of Tokyo. More than 30,000 people joined this activity for more than two years. We successfully identified 476 new dark patches within 1.0x10^7km2, which is about 7.06% of the entire Mars. This gives the formational rate of 1.3x10^-5/km2/yr, which is one order of magnitude larger than previous analyses based on image analyses and theoretical impact flux.

Free Research Field

惑星科学