Planet Four Talk

The First Planet Four Science Paper Submitted

  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hi All,

    I've been waiting years to write this statement. The first Planet Four science paper was submitted to the journal Icarus yesterday. The science team has been working to get this point for a long time. We're definitely glad this moment is here, and we wanted to send a big thank you for all your time and effort. Now the manuscript will go for peer review where two independent and usually anonymous referees will read and critique the paper. We'll let you know what the status is once we get the referee's reports come back and we get a sense for what things we need to address, revise, and then send back to the referees. So this process can take a few months before the paper is accepted. We'll keep you posted.

    Michael put a lot of time and effort into the data reduction pipeline and is lead author of the paper, which is currently titled 'Planet Four: Probing Seasonal Winds on Mars by Mapping the Southern Polar CO2 Jet Deposits'. I'm second author on the manuscript. We are working to make sure we acknowledge everyone's effort in some way with an authors website. We're working with the Zooniverse on that now. A huge thank you for all you do for Planet Four. We'll have a blog post ready soon as much detail as we can give now, and more when then paper is officially accepted for publication.

    More to come soon.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • pete-j by pete-j

    Congratulations! That is really great to hear 😃

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  • p.titchin by p.titchin in response to mschwamb's comment.

    fingers crossed!

    Posted

  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hiya,

    A blog post is up with more details about the paper, including a link to the pre-print version

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • Kitharode by Kitharode moderator

    Downloaded the pre-print paper and had a browse through it. I'm not going to pretend that I understood all of it (the computery-techno stuff is way over my head) but I do appreciate how much work has gone into it all. The wind roses in the results section of the paper are fantastic. Easy to understand and very informative. Hopefully there will be more of them in the future and we'll begin to get a real feel for the winds of Mars' south pole.

    The science team are very generous with their praise of the P4 volunteers and I felt rather proud to be a tiny part of that volunteer workforce. It's been an amazing experience and I've learned a great deal. Safe to say I've made a few new long-distance friends too. 😃

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  • pete-j by pete-j in response to Kitharode's comment.

    Congratulations again! An amazing piece of work, which greatly sums-up the project...

    Looking at the citizen science contributors to P4: 136,315 with 5,404,473 images having being classified at the time of posting these words. This gives an average of: 39.64 (40 images) classified per contributor. Of course this is just an average figure and no doubt the real spread may look something like a Gaussian Distribution! At one end there is a small number of contributors who logged on with one or two images classified. At the other end another handful of those having classified 5,000 perhaps over 10,000 images! The regulars who have been with this project for a number of years and who have often posted.

    There are two ways...

    Of acknowledging these contributions on the paper. The Authors page gives every citizen scientist a mention. Great, but unbalanced.

    Alternatively, the inclusion of a handful of representatives from the top end of this 'distribution' of citizen authors would cement the relationship in this paper; i.e. that citizen scientists have given to P4. As Dr. Candice Hansen mentions (the regulars) in her blog on January 17th 2018.

    Cheers,

    PJ

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator in response to pete-j's comment.

    Hi Pete,

    Thanks for the feedback and sharing your thoughts. I can see your viewpoint. The science team felt for this first paper that we wanted to acknowledge everyone in this case in the same way. The science team can definitely revist that idea for other future papers.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

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  • pete-j by pete-j in response to mschwamb's comment.

    Hi Meg,

    Thanks for the thoughts. Just reflecting on the above, perhaps both forms of acknowledgement could be used in future papers at the same time? Then it is a win-win situation and no-one is missed out.

    I'll leave it there...

    Cheers, 😃

    Pete J.

    Posted

  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hi,

    A quick update. We're still waiting to hear back from the referees. It looks like their review is taking much longer than the typical 1 month timeline. We'll let you know when we know more.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hi,

    A quick note to say that we got the referees' reports back. We have some recommended changes to make and some questions/concerns to reply to, but all and all the referees' were very positive about the paper. Over the next month, we'll work on addressing the referees' concerns and recommendations to resubmit the paper for a second review. We'll keep you posted.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hi,

    An update. We just resubmitted the paper to the journal. We expect the editor will take a brief amount of time to look at our responses to the referees' reports and then decide if the paper should be accepted or send it back to the referees for their feedback on our response and then updated manuscript.

    Fingers crossed,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • Kitharode by Kitharode moderator in response to mschwamb's comment.

    Many thanks for the update. The excitement builds with every new update and the science team must feel it even more than I do.

    Fingers, toes, arms and legs are all crossed .... 😉

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hi All,

    I'm pleased to announce that the paper was officially accepted for publication by the journal Icarus. Congratulations to everyone. Thank you for all of your help and contributions. This is just the first we hope of many other publications to come.

    More details and info in a blog post coming soon.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • p.titchin by p.titchin

    At last !! It must be a relief after all the hard work you all have put into this paper. Congratulations. -pete

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  • Kitharode by Kitharode moderator

    Yaaaay ... Congratulations. 😃

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hiya,

    Definitely thrilled to see the paper out there. Also related to the paper, I also got a talk about the paper results at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. The meeting is in Knoxville, TN in later October.

    Cheers,
    ~Meg

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hiya,

    The blog post is out. You can read it here.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted