At the end of 2020, planetary scientist Marek Slipski found himself glued to his computer, spending countless hours—more than he’d like to admit, he says—poring over image after image of the Martian atmosphere: zooming in, adjusting the contrast, upping the brightness, and playing around with color. Slipski, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), was looking for clouds. Although he’d written up an algorithm for the task, it was yielding mixed results, so he’d resorted to eyeballing the data instead.
But this quickly became overwhelming. Even in the small chunk of data Slipski was studying, there were so many distinct cloud populations, each varying in height and brightness.
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