You might be intrigued by NASA's extraordinary achievements on Mars, so why not get involved yourself by helping researchers solve one of the planet's enduring mysteries?

Researchers at NASA are inviting volunteers to help them figure out why Mars' atmosphere is just 1% as dense as Earth's, a seemingly paradoxical result given that Mars once had a much thicker atmosphere.

'The planet's air pressure is so low that liquid water simply vaporizes from its surface into its atmosphere,' NASA said. 'But lakes and rivers covered Mars billions of years ago, suggesting the atmosphere was thicker back then.'

A key part of the study will include trying to understand the formation of martian clouds, especially water ice clouds, which could tell us how much water vapor gets in the atmosphere - and which seasons it occurs..”

You do not have to come up with complex scientific theories to assist NASA (though NASA would love to hear from you if you do). Instead, NASA scientists want you to participate in the Cloudspotting on Mars project and sift through data to identify Martian clouds.

There's plenty of data for folks to analyze, according to Armin Kleinboehl of JPL. It's 'very valuable' data, collected by the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which lets scientists 'see how temperatures and clouds change with seasons and from year to year,' but Kleinboehl acknowledged that 'it's a lot of data for a small team to look through.'

MCS uses infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, to study the planet's atmosphere. Clouds appear as distinct arches in the MCS's data (depicted below) - with the peak showing the cloud at the highest altitude - and it is these arches that NASA wants you to help it spot.

As participants examine the data on the citizen science platform Zooniverse, they are being asked to highlight the arches, which will help the scientists determine where in the atmosphere these arches are present.

Identifying these particular clouds will let scientists create maps of where they form, determine what they are made of (water, carbon dioxide, or dust), and observe how they change throughout the day and through the seasons.

This should improve understanding of how martian clouds form and how they affect the planet's climate and atmosphere.

If you're wondering why NASA's scientists didn't just create an algorithm to do the work, they did. However, they found that humans are actually faster at completing the task. In spite of this, they haven't given up on developing a more effective algorithm, and are hoping the data from the current project will help them to do so.