January 9, 2001

7:40 PM

New career option! Be slave worker on the Martian surface!
This is pretty cool, actually. It's an internet based pilot study run by NASA to identify and classify all of the craters on the surface of Mars. This is a big job. All you need is a IE 5 or Netscape 6 web browser. Since its inception on November 17, web users combined have contributed 111,938 crater-markings and 26,877 crater-classification.
posted by lagado (2 comments total)

http://www.amiacraterornot.com
posted by Lirp at 9:17 PM on January 10, 2001

Heh. Good one.

It's worth looking at a sample results page to get a sense of how this works: the clicking of many people on the perceived crater edges is compiled and translated into, essentially, consensus circles.

I can imagine it would get quite boring, but that's why it's on the internet -- to spread out the workload over thousands of surfers instead of a handful of ill-used grad students.
posted by dhartung at 9:45 PM on January 10, 2001