Every year for the past forty-two years, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) has taken place near Houston, TX (USA). It has become the premier and main planetary science conference, at least in the USA, and has grown over the years to thousands of participants submitting nearly 2,000 abstracts to be presented as either talks or posters. This year’s conference is March 19-23.

This year, the innocuous Abstract #2856 will be presented as a poster on Tuesday night from 6 until 9PM: “Cataloging the Moon with the CosmoQuest Moon Mappers Citizen Science Project.”

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be putting together the poster to present (and we’ll post an image of it here when it’s done!). The poster will briefly talk about Moon Mappers, how it’s set up, and what we’re asking you to do. But the majority of the poster will discuss early results, showing off what you’ve been working on over the past ~5 weeks … and we’ll wait to print the poster until the last possible moment so that we can include the latest data over the next ~5 weeks.

It’s a bit too early to know exactly what we’ll be showing, whether we’ll be able to illustrate any of the broader science results yet, but at the very least we’ll show preliminary results. Even though you’ve identified over 90,000 craters at this point, the most-done image has averaged 2.6 views per image slice — we want to get that average up to at least 5 before we start to do science analyses from it.

We’re looking forward to what data we can gather as Moon Mappers (and CosmoQuest in general) gains a broader foothold and grows its user base. We’re also working behind the scenes to implement fixes and changes and other things, but we’re inching towards a formal “we’re live!” announcement that may come within the next week or so.