MAPPER
The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) has been investigating the underwater environment of Pavilion and Kelly Lake in British Columbia, Canada with DeepWorker submersible vehicles since 2008. Now with MAPPER, you can work side-by-side with NASA scientists to explore the bottom of these lakes from the perspective of a DeepWorker pilot.
The PLRP team makes use of DeepWorker subs to explore and document freshwater carbonate formations known as microbialites that thrive in Pavilion and Kelly Lake. Many scientists believe that a better understanding of how and where these rare microbialite formations develop will lead to deeper insights into where signs of life may be found on Mars and beyond. To investigate microbialite formation in detail, photos of the lake bottom are recorded by PLRP’s DeepWorker sub pilots, which must be analyzed to determine what types of features can be found in different parts of the lake. Ultimately, detailed maps can be generated to help answer questions like “how does microbialite texture and size vary with depth?” and “why do microbialites grow in certain parts of the lake but not in others?” But before these questions can be answered, all the photos must be analyzed and tagged.
After creating a free account at http://getmapper.com, you’ll be asked to take a brief tutorial that helps you learn how to tag photos in the PLRP dataset. Tagging is easy — if a feature like sediment, microbialites, rocks, algae, etc, are found in a photo, just click the corresponding tag and continue to the next photo. As you make progress, you’ll score points, earn downloads, track your ranking on the leaderboard, and review the coolest photos that have been tagged by you and other participants.
To learn more, visit http://getmapper.com or watch the overview video (http://youtu.be/6aBkL7Q-RIo).
Facebook: http://facebook.com/getmapper
YouTube: http://youtu.be/6aBkL7Q-RIo
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