During its many years exploring Mars in a bid to better understand the history of the planet and our galaxy at large, NASA has accumulated a lot of data.

Now, the spacefaring agency is calling on the public and wannabe astronomers to help it spot clouds on Mars. Okay so technically you won’t be looking at clouds but rather data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“We now have over 16 years of data for us to search through, which is very valuable – it lets us see how temperatures and clouds change over different seasons and from year to year,” explains deputy principal investigator for the Mars Climate Sounder at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Armin Kleinboehl.

Given the large amount of data the team needs to analyse, NASA is now making use of its Citizen Science Seed Funding to make this data available to citizens for analysis. The data is available on Zooniverse here.

So, what exactly should you be looking for? In a word, arches.

As NASA explains, clouds on Mars appear as arches in the data. Identifying where these arches are could help researchers determine where they occur in the Martian atmosphere.

“Like Earth, Mars has clouds made of water ice. But unlike Earth, it also has clouds made of carbon dioxide (think: dry ice), which form when it gets cold enough for the Martian atmosphere to freeze locally. By understanding where and how these clouds appear, scientists hope to better understand the structure of Mars’ middle atmosphere, which is about 30 to 50 miles (50 to 80 kilometers) in altitude,” NASA explained in an announcement.

There are instructions over on the Zooniverse page linked above, as well as a tutorial but we have to caution you, this is going to be time consuming work. With that having been said, we may just spend an hour or two a day spotting clouds in NASA’s data because we also want to understand the history of our galaxy.