Education and Public Outreach

I’m really excited about the PLRP 2011 field season because this year, anyone with an internet connection will be able to contribute directly to the scientific outcome of the project. By signing up to become a member of the PLRP Remote Science Team through MAPPER, a new web-based interface for exploring the lake bottom, you’ll be working with our project scientists to categorize and map the quantity, distribution and types of various features found in the lake. Generating this kind of ‘feature map’ for Pavilion and Kelly Lake is important since it can help scientists figure out where life may have one existed on Mars and in other parts of the solar system a long time ago. In a sense, by helping to explore the lakes of British Columbia, you’re helping scientists search for signs of life in space. I think that’s pretty cool.

Categorizing and mapping the lake bottom in detail is a big job — PLRP has systematically generated 100′s of thousands of images of the bottom of Pavilion Lake (and soon, Kelly Lake), and each one must be looked at and categorized by hand to identify each feature and its physical properties. Since these images are all geo-referenced, each one can be pinned to specific geographic location to complete the ‘feature map’ for each lake. As you can well imagine, going through 100′s of thousands of photos one-by-one takes a really long time. In fact, if you printed them all out, the stack of photos would be ‘deeper’ than Pavilion Lake!

Many hands make light work, as the saying goes. The idea behind MAPPER is that if a lot of people contribute just a little bit of time to tagging the PLRP photoset, the job will get done a lot more quickly. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to get anyone who’s interested in PLRP, science, or space exploration directly involved in the outcome of the project.

More details about MAPPER will be posted in the coming weeks, so please stay tuned for more announcements. You’ll be able to check out MAPPER at www.getmapper.com once the system’s fully up and running.

In the meantime, I’m busy adding new features and polish to the software that powers MAPPER. In fact, I just had a great trial run of MAPPER’s photo tagging system with Bree Mireau’s students at Riverside Secondary School in Port Coquitlam, BC. Bree gave the students an introduction to the PLRP and analogue activities in general, then I gave a quick introduction to MAPPER. Bree also put together a great fill-in-the-blank definitions sheet of the different substratum types found in the lake for the students to fill out, highlighting some fun educational opportunities to integrate MAPPER into the classroom.

The students then got their hands on MAPPER, which was loaded up with a trial photoset from the PLRP 2010 season. Over a 25 minute period, 3,500 classifications were submitted by 20 student groups. The students were all working concurrently on different chunks of the same photoset, which considerably sped up the whole process versus how we’ve been doing this in the past.

On average, DeepWorker sub flights during the 2008-2010 seasons generated around 1,000 to 2,000 images each. This means that we can expect to classify more than 2 flights’ worth of images (with about 20 remote classifiers working concurrently) in just 30 minutes. Of course, with more remote scientists we could get this done even faster. This is a big step in the right direction!

Efficiencies aside, I think it’s wonderful that these students were able to contribute data to a real-world NASA and CSA-funded mission of exploration as full-fledged remote scientists. In a few weeks, everyone will have the very same opportunity.

Finally, a big thanks to Bree and her students at Riverside Secondary for putting yesterday’s activities together!

Nick Wilkinson, MAPPER developer
Rask Systems Inc

We have moved… but only down the road. The 2011 PLRP field camp has moved locations to explore our analog research potential even further. This season, fieldwork will take place at Kelly Lake near the small town of Clinton, British Columbia. The PLRP 2011 Education and Public Outreach initiatives will be lead by Dana Lis, (PLRP former camp cook and Canadian Sport Dietitian), British Columbia teachers; Jennifer Stonehouse, Bree Mireau and Leanne Shortridge and Studio98’s renowned website and design expert Rafferty Pendery. As a team we are excited to build from EPO initiatives from past seasons and expand the education component to reach other schools, teachers and space education programs. We are very excited to share the ever-evolving science, learning and education from Pavilion Lake to Kelly Lake and beyond.

This season the education team is holding the first ever, professional development program (Pro-D). Twelve teachers from various areas of BC will be joining Bree, Leanne and Jenn for a 2.5-day workshop to discover innovative tools and techniques for bringing Mars Life to the classroom. This Pro-D will truly be a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring analog research to the students by giving them access to the same hands on tools and technology that NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronauts use.

We are looking forward to Discovery’s Daily Planet potentially filming a second episode about the PLRP. So far the discussion surrounding the story line for this episode focuses on the thrilling new tools and technologies that will be integrated into PLRP and the Kelly Lake field location. The new technologies include the SCORE program for mission planning and life feed video streaming from the subs. Keep an eye out for the upcoming video blogs in which scientists, the IRG team and the SCORE team from NASA-Ames and JSC will discuss the technologies that they bring to the project and how they are also used in planning space missions. Keep an eye out for Henry Bortmans’s special features on PLRP in Astrobiology magazine, the Vancouver Sun, twitter, Facebook and live video feed right here on www.pavilionlake.com.  The field season runs from July 16th – July 25th but the team has already been hard at work since last summer designing the new tools, flight plans and logistics for the 2011 season.