2022 July 7

Jovian Vortex Hunter: a Zooniverse project to classify Jupiter’s vortices

John Rogers

A new Citizen Science project has been launched to identify vortices on Jupiter in images from the Juno orbiter.  Everyone is invited to take part.  Here is the announcement:

Do you like JunoCam images? Do you want to learn more about the clouds on Jupiter? Join us at the newly launched Jovian Vortex Hunter project on Zooniverse to help us classify cloud features on Jupiter. We need citizen scientists to help us look through images from Juno to identify vortices and characterize their shape and color. Vortices are large round clouds, like hurricanes on Earth. On Jupiter, vortices can be several thousand miles wide and come in a variety of colors, from white to deep brown, and even have very irregular shapes. Each vortex on Jupiter is different and understanding how and why they form can tell us more about Jupiter’s atmosphere, especially below the clouds where telescopes cannot see. Help us understand the physics of the jovian atmosphere by creating a catalogue of the different types of vortices in JunoCam data, by going to : https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ramanakumars/jovian-vortex-hunter

The web site gives clear instructions and a tutorial.  Volunteers will be presented with small portions of JunoCam images and asked whether they contain vortices (or cloud bands or  turbulent features), and whether the vortices are white, red, brown or dark. The results will be combined with a large-scale ‘neural network’ computational analysis of the images, which will produce a full representation of the diversity of features; the goal of the Zooniverse project is to provide simple labels that will help to establish recognisable categories, thus bringing some order into the plethora of small features in Jupiter’s dynamic atmosphere.

The project is a collaboration of researchers at the University of Minnesota with the JunoCam and Zooniverse teams.