Eva Nichols examines images of the surface of Mars as she looks for the location of the Spirit rover from the Mars Surface Imaging Project as part of her astronomy class work at Catalina Foothills High School.

Photos by Kelly Presnell / Arizona Daily Star

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A Catalina Foothills High School astronomy class is teaming up with NASA and the state's two biggest universities to identify land features on Mars.

The astronomy class is participating in two outreach programs to build a partnership with the two universities, while scientists want to involve the students in the scientific process and get some help identifying the land features on numerous images taken by the two cameras.

The class is working with NASA's Clickworkers program and Arizona State University's Mars Student Imaging Project.

In the Clickworkers program, students identify terrain features by viewing images from the University of Arizona's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and submitting their findings to a database accessed by scientists.

Through ASU's imaging project, students identify terrain features and examine soil compositions through the use of the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera, which measures the height and temperatures of Mars surface features.

The ASU Mars Education Program, which administers the Mars Student Imaging Project, is an outreach program geared toward high school students across the country.

The program allows classes to write a proposal suggesting which direction to aim the THEMIS camera, said astronomy teacher James Humphreys. Humphreys expects his class to write the proposal in the beginning of March.

If the ASU Mars Education Program accepts the proposal, the class would get the first look at those images for its own research purposes before they're available to the community, Humphreys said.

Both university programs are free and accessible via the Internet, he said.

Two separate spacecraft are carrying the cameras: The HiRISE is one of the instruments aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and NASA's Mars Odyssey is carrying the THEMIS camera.

Humphreys said the projects provide an in-depth look at the planet that cannot be found in textbooks.

"The huge advantage to students is using images that very few people have seen and actively participating in the scientific process," he said.

The Clickworkers program asks for the public's help as well, said Virginia Gulick, a planetary geologist who oversees HiRISE's education and public outreach component.

"The public is paying for our mission, so I think they should be able to contribute in a real way."

People can log onto a Web site and look at images taken from the HiRISE camera, and then identify the land features by clicking on an icon, she said.

There are examples of different land features on the page to help people know what they're looking for, she said.

The land features will be cataloged and stored in a database, she said.

Some of the students have focused on comparing the surfaces of the Earth and Mars.

"Martian features are more distinct because there's not a lot of erosion and weathering like there is on the Earth," said senior Eva Nichols, 17.

Nichols was working on one of the classroom computers on Feb. 19, looking at an image that identifies the heights of land features using colors.

"You can tell where the valleys and volcanoes are, and can see craters, streams, crevices and plateaus," she said.

Junior Jonathan Kinkade, 16, said his class has an advantage over the general public in identifying features because of the topics they've covered in astronomy class.

"They need people with a basis of what they're doing astronomy-wise, somebody who's taken a class," Kinkade said, referring to the scientists who have to sort through thousands of images.

Identifying the land features involves a lot of speculating, said senior Lee Ann Felder,18.

"I've learned how difficult it is to determine features, especially if the features are coming in or out of the surface," Felder said.

Looking at the images and guessing beats reading about them in a textbook, she said.

"We get to be a part of the process of discovering things about the surface," she said. "I think it's really cool."