Anya Portyankina

Ganna (Anya) Portyankina is currently the  Head of the Planetary geology department at the Institut für Planetenforschung (DLR) in Berlin (Germany). 

She has a Master degree in Physics and Astronomy from the Kharkiv National University (Ukraine) and a PhD in Astrophysics from Göttingen University, Germany. 

After her PhD thesis she has worked at prestigious research institutions on planetary science in Europe and USA: Max Planck Institute for Solar System research in Lindau (Germany), University of Bern (Switzerland), Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder (USA). Her main expertise is remote sensing of planetary surfaces and atmospheres. 

She researches behaviour of different ices and their interactions with atmospheres and surfaces to reveal how they are able to shape planetary surfaces into terrains we observe. That is the case of the Martian polar regions. “The Mars I study is really active; the surface constantly changes. We have collected a lot of image data about changing seasonal features near the south pole. There is so much that we can’t analyze all of it on our own.” 

For that reason, during her stay in Colorado she led the PLANET FOUR: Terrains, a citizen science project to study the South polar regions of Mars. The goal was to identify and measure seasonal fans that cover the polarregions in the south in the spring. More than 135,000 people have participated and almost 5 millioncutouts from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) images have been analyzed, via the web portal “Planet Four” at http://www.planetfour.org. This website is part of the Zooniverse collection of onlinecitizen science projects.