Astronomy 0089, Fall 2011, Kosowsky Assignment 5: Due Wednesday October 5 in class

The features on the surface of the moon have been created by geological processes during the formation of the moon, and by impacts of asteroids. A recent satellite called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken millions of high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface. One of the most important analysis tasks for these pictures is to identify and measure sizes of all the craters: this information helps decode the history of impacts on the moon and the evolution of the asteroid population of the solar system. It turns out that people are much better at identifying craters and other lunar features than current computer programs. This assignment asks you to help with an ongoing scientic analysis project to analyze the lunar photographs. You may work in groups of three or four to learn how to do the analysis. Then each student must analyze their own set of images. Once you learn the analysis procedure, it is recommended that you spend no more than one minute or so analyzing each image. Do the best you can, but dont worry too much about any particular image analysis being absolutely correct: each image is examined by many people and average answers are used in the scientic analysis. Read over the following questions. Then go to http://www.moonzoo.org and click on the How To Take Part link on the left. This will take you to a tutorial page where you can view a 4-minute video showing the analysis procedure. Then scroll down further and read the Extended Crater Survey Tutorial. Once you understand the procedure, click on the orange Login button at the top left and create an account for yourself. Analyze 20 images from the Crater Survey and answer the questions below based on your images. You can save the images you analyze by clicking on the star button at the bottom right of the interface before submitting each image. Note that images are selected randomly from the entire image database. Use a separate sheet of paper to answer the questions. PUT YOUR NAME AND RECITATION SECTION AT THE TOP OF YOUR PAPER. 1. About how many of your 20 images have craters? 2. Did you nd any small craters within larger ones? About how many images showed features like this? 3. Does your ability to determine shapes of craters vary depending on the angle of illumination from the sun? In other words, do shadows ever interfere with your ability to identify or measure craters? 4. Did you nd any craters with boulders or blocks in them? 5. Did you nd in any images any of the odd features listed in the tutorial bench craters, at-bottomed craters, dark-haloed craters, fresh white craters, elongated pits, linear features, boulder tracks, crater chains, or sinuous channels? Spacecraft hardware? Any other unusual features? 6. When you have classied at least 20 images, go to My Moon Zoo to nd out where on the moon your images were taken. List the areas of your images. A second analysis task, Boulder Wars, is also available, where you are asked to compare two images and say which one has more boulders. I nd this one less interesting. Try clicking the other links on the left. You can see who is doing image analysis at any given time, how many images have been analyzed to date, comment in a forum, read a blog about the science project, and nd more information about the science of the moon that is being explored with these images. Moon Zoo is one of a number of image analysis projects that are currently running. You can try some others by clicking on the Zooniverse label at the top left; this link will take you to a page listing the other projects. Please contribute to any of them as much as you are interested, and thank you for your eorts in advancing science projects!