App Review: Earth or Not Earth

The folks at Cosmoquest have released a cool new citizen science app for Android! “Earth or Not Earth” allows players to test their knowledge of Earth, as well as learn more about the fascinating geology of the rocky worlds in our solar system. You can also challenge your friends on Facebook to beat your scores, thanks to the Facebook integration feature.

“Earth or Not Earth” was developed by Southern Illinois University graduate student and Cosmoquest developer Joseph Moore. Moore designed “Earth or Not Earth,” and included two additional game features: “Matching” and “Pick 2.” The images used in “Earth or Not Earth” are public domain, and are sourced primarily from NASA planetary science missions, with more images to be added to the app in the future.

The app does cost $1.99 USD, and the Proceeds from “Earth or Not Earth” help fund the programmers at Cosmoquest, as well as citizen science programs, educational programs, and future mobile apps.

"Earth or Not Earth" Main Menu - Click to embiggen
“Earth or Not Earth” main menu – Click to embiggen.
Image Credit: Cosmoquest
The user interface for “Earth or Not Earth” is pretty straightforward. After installing the app, the initial screen will prompt users to login with their Cosmoquest credentials (or create a new account). While some may see this as an annoyance, a Cosmoquest account allows access to many of the other citizen science projects Cosmoquest offers, such as Moon Mappers, Asteroid Mappers, and others.

After logging in, users are able to select one of several game-play options.

Players can start with the “Learn” section, which allows users to learn more about the rocky worlds in our solar system. Additionally, users can learn about geologic features such as craters, volcanism, fault lines, and even man-made surface alterations.

After learning about the processes that shape and alter rocky worlds in our solar system, users can test their knowledge with the “Earth or Not Earth”, “Matching”, or “Pick Two” mini-games.

Earth or Not Earth? Click to embiggen. Image Credit: Cosmoquest
Earth or Not Earth?
Click to embiggen.
Image Credit: Cosmoquest
“Earth or Not Earth” Displays images from various NASA planetary missions. The goal for the player is to determine if the image is of Earth, or Not. For those looking for a greater challenge, the “Matching” minigame provides an image that players must try to match to a rocky world, or a planetary geology process.

The most challenging mini-game in “Earth or Not Earth” is “Pick Two”, where players select two images that belong to the same world out of several shown on screen. With some images being in color, and others in black and white, players must rely on the knowledge gained from the “Learn” feature to make educated deductions about which images belong to which world.

Fans of planetary science will find “Earth or Not Earth” a challenging, yet entertaining and educational gaming experience. Gameplay is quick, and makes for a nice break between meetings, or something to pass the time while waiting to catch the bus.

“Earth or Not Earth” is available from the Google Play store at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.cosmoquest.earthnotearth If you’d like to learn more about how the app was developed, Cosmoquest has a blog post available at: http://cosmoquest.org/blog/2013/12/got-earth/

Watch Live Webcast: Space Warps

Hubble Space Telescope image shows Einstein ring of one of the SLACS gravitational lenses, with the lensed background galaxy enhanced in blue. A. Bolton (UH/IfA) for SLACS and NASA/ESA.

Want to join the hunt for new galaxies? During a special G+ Hangout today, June 5, a team of astronomers will share how you can help them find faint and distant galaxies by joining a search they’ve called “Space Warps.” This is a new project from the Zooniverse. The team of astronomers will discuss gravitational lensing, a strange phenomenon that actually makes it possible for us to see a galaxy far away and otherwise hidden by clusters of galaxies in front of them. They will also answer your questions about their ongoing search for distant galaxies, what this reveals about the cosmos, and how astronomers are beginning to fill out our picture of the universe.

You can watch in the window below, and the webcast starts at 21:00 UTC (2:00 p.m. PDT, 5:00 pm EDT). You can take part in thise live Google+ Hangout, and have your questions answered by submitting them before or during the webcast. Email questions to [email protected] or send a message on Twitter with the hashtag #KavliAstro.

If you miss it live, you can watch the replay below, as well.

The participants:
• ANUPREETA MORE is a co-Principal Investigator of Space Warps and a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo.
• PHILIP MARSHALL is a researcher at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University and SLAC.
• ARFON SMITH is Director of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and Technical Lead of Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org).

You can also get more info at the Kavli Foundation, and visit the Space Warps website here.

Soviet Lander Spotted by Mars Orbiter

The bright spot in the center of this HiRISE image may be the 11-meter-wide parachute from Mars 3's descent stage (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

On May 28, 1971, the Soviet Union launched the Mars 3 mission which, like its previously-launched and ill-fated sibling Mars 2, consisted of an orbiter and lander destined for the Red Planet. Just over six months later on December 2, 1971, Mars 3 arrived at Mars — five days after Mars 2 crashed. The Mars 3 descent module separated from the orbiter and several hours later entered the Martian atmosphere, descending to the surface via a series of parachutes and retrorockets. (Sound familiar?) Once safely on the surface, the Mars 3 lander opened its four petal-shaped covers to release the 4.5-kg PROP-M rover contained inside… and after 20 seconds of transmission, fell silent. Due to unknown causes, the Mars 3 lander was never heard from or seen again.

Until now.

These images show what might be hardware from the Soviet Union's 1971 Mars 3 lander ( NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)
These images show what might be hardware from the Soviet Union’s 1971 Mars 3 lander (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

The set of images above shows what might be hardware from the 1971 Soviet Mars 3 lander, seen in a pair of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

While following news about Mars and NASA’s Curiosity rover, Russian citizen enthusiasts found four features in a five-year-old image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that resemble four pieces of hardware from the Mars 3 mission: the parachute, heat shield, terminal retrorocket and lander. A follow-up image by the orbiter from last month shows the same features.

“Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out.”

– Alfred McEwen, HiRISE Principal Investigator

The Mars 3 lander (NSSDC)
The Mars 3 lander (NSSDC)

Vitali Egorov from St. Petersburg, Russia, heads the largest Russian Internet community about Curiosity. His subscribers did the preliminary search for Mars 3 via crowdsourcing. Egorov modeled what Mars 3 hardware pieces should look like in a HiRISE image, and the group carefully searched the many small features in this large image, finding what appear to be viable candidates in the southern part of the scene. Each candidate has a size and shape consistent with the expected hardware, and they are arranged on the surface as expected from the entry, descent and landing sequence.

“I wanted to attract people’s attention to the fact that Mars exploration today is available to practically anyone,” Egorov said. “At the same time we were able to connect with the history of our country, which we were reminded of after many years through the images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.”

The predicted Mars 3 landing site was at latitude 45 degrees south, longitude 202 degrees east, in Ptolemaeus Crater. HiRISE acquired a large image at this location in November 2007, and promising candidates for the hardware from Mars 3 were found on Dec. 31, 2012.

Candidate features of the Mars 3 retrorockets (top) and lander (bottom)
Candidate features of the Mars 3 retrorockets (top) and lander (bottom)

The candidate parachute is the most distinctive feature in the images (seen above at top.) It is an especially bright spot for this region, about 8.2 yards (7.5 meters) in diameter.

The parachute would have a diameter of 12 yards (11 meters) if fully spread out over the surface, so this is consistent.

“Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out,” said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Further analysis of the data and future images to better understand the three-dimensional shapes may help to confirm this interpretation.”

Source: NASA/JPL

 

How To Crowdsource Astronomy Without People Messing It Up

A family portrait of the PH1 planetary system that was discovered in part due to crowdsourcing. Image Credit: Haven Giguere/Yale.

Maybe it’s because Jurassic Park is in theaters again, but we at Universe Today sometimes worry about how one person can mess up an otherwise technologically amazing system. It took just one nefarious employee to shut down the dinosaur park’s security fences in the movie and cause havoc. How do we ensure science can fight against that, especially when everyday citizens are getting more and more involved in the scientific process?

But perhaps, after talking to Chris Lintott, that view is too suspicious. Lintott is in charge of a collaborative astronomy and science project called the Zooniverse that uses public contributions to fuel some of the science he performs. Basically, anyone with an Internet connection and a desire to contribute can hunt for planets or examine astronomical objects, among many other projects.

Lintott, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, says the science requires public contributions. Moreover, he hasn’t had a problem yet despite 800,000 individual contributors to the Zooniverse. He told Universe Today about how that’s possible in an e-mail interview.

1) Zooniverse has already produced tangible scientific results in space through collaborating with ordinary folks. Can you talk about some of the papers/findings that have been produced in your various projects?

There’s a long, long list. I’m particularly excited at the minute about our work on bulgeless galaxies; most spiral galaxies have a bulge full of old stars at their centre, but we’ve found plenty that don’t. That’s exciting because we think that means that they’re guaranteed not to have had a big merger in the last 10 billion years or so, and that means we can use them to figure out just what effect mergers have on galaxies. You’ll be hearing more about them in the next year or so as we have plenty of observing time lined up.

I’m also a big fan of Planet Hunters 1b, our first confirmed planet discovery – it’s a planet in a four-star system, and thus provides a nice challenge to our understanding of how planets form. We’ve found lots of planet candidates (systems where we’re more than 90% sure there’s a planet there) but it’s nice to get one confirmed and especially nice for it to be such an interesting world.

One of Zooniverse's projects examines the nature of spiral galaxies, particularly those without central bulges at the center. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)
One of Zooniverse’s projects examines the nature of spiral galaxies, particularly those without central bulges at the center. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)

2) What benefits have you received from involving the public in space projects, in terms of results as well as raising awareness?

We couldn’t do our research any other way. Astronomers have got very good in the last few decades at collecting information about the universe, but we’re not always so good at learning how to use all of that information. The Zooniverse allows us to collaborate with hundreds of thousands of people so that we can scale our efforts to deal with that flood of data, and many of those volunteers go much further than just clicking on buttons we provide. So really our research is now driven in collaboration with thousands of people, spread all around the world – that’s an inspiring thought.

3) How many people do you manage in your space projects, approximately? How do you keep track of them all?

We have more than 800,000 registered volunteers – luckily, the computer keeps track of them (when they log in!).

4) How do you ensure their results meet the standards of scientific publication?

We carefully design projects so that we’re sure they will produce scientifically useful results before they’re launched; this usually means running a test with a small amount of data and comparing work done by volunteers with that of professionals. We usually find the volunteers are better than us! It helps that we have several people complete each task, so collectively we don’t make accidental mistakes.

5) How do you guard against somebody deliberately or accidentally altering the results?

The system insists that every classification is independent, and as we have several people look at each classification finding any deliberate attack would be easy – in any case, we’ve never seen any evidence of such a thing. Despite popular reports, most people are nice!

Wanted: Asteroid Mappers to Help Scientists Delve Through Data from Dawn

Many types of craters are captured in this panorama of recent Dawn images. Credit: NASA

There’s a new citizen science project in town, and this one will allow you to be among the first to see high-resolution, stunning images of Vesta from the Dawn mission. Called AsteroidMappers, the project asks the public to help the Dawn mission scientists to identify craters, boulders and other features on Vesta’s surface. “If you’ve already been addicted to MoonMappers, you’ll be even more addicted to AsteroidMappers!”said Nicole Gugliucci from CosmoQuest, home to several citizen science projects.

As you know, Dawn has been in orbit of the asteroid Vesta, but just recently left orbit and is now on its way to Ceres. This is a first in space exploration, where a spacecraft orbits one body and then leaves to go on to another. This can only be accomplished because of Dawn’s revolutionary ion engine.

The goal of the Dawn mission is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system’s earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formations. Ceres and Vesta both reside in the asteroid belt, but yet each has followed a very different evolutionary path constrained by the diversity of processes that operated during the first few million years of solar system evolution.

Even the Dawn scientists have been amazed at what they’ve seen at Vesta.

“We have acquired so much more data than we had planned even in late 2011,” Dr. Marc Rayman, the mission’s Chief Engineer, told Universe Today in a previous article. “We have conducted a tremendous exploration of Vesta – the second most massive body between Mars and Jupiter, a giant of the main asteroid belt.”

With AsteroidMappers (Vesta Edition), you’ll be helping the Dawn scientists learn more – not only about Vesta, but about how our solar system evolved.

As with every CosmoQuest project, there is a tutorial to help you get started. But the work area is fairly intuitive, with instructions and hints along the way.

The Dawn scientists have not yet released to the public all the images, so by working on this citizen science project, you’ll be looking at pristine images that perhaps no one else has seen before. The images are absolutely beautiful, as Vesta has turned out to be even more fascinating than expected, with huge impact basins, steep cliffs and unusual features on its surface.

“Vesta is unlike any other object we’ve visited in the solar system,” said Dawn mission team member Vishnu Reddy. “We see a wide range of variation on the surface, with some areas bright as snow, and other areas as dark as coal.”

Scientists have said that Vesta more closely resembles a small planet or Earth’s Moon than another asteroid, and they now have a better understanding of both Vesta’s surface and interior, and can conclusively link Vesta with meteorites that have fallen on Earth.

So, check out AsteroidMappers and enjoy the views! As @therealjason said on Twitter, “I don’t map Vesta very often, but when I do, I choose @cosmoquestX – Stay curious, my friends.”

Learn more about the Dawn mission here.

Wishing the Zooniverse a Happy 5th Birthday!

Galaxy Zoo was a project set up in July 2007 by astronomers Chris Lintott and Kevin Schawinski asking members of the public to help classify a million galaxy images produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Five years on and Galaxy Zoo has grown into an entire Zooniverse of projects allowing members to contribute to real science across a range of disciplines. Join us to celebrate the giant of citizen science, mark its achievements and look forward to the future.

Modern science can produce huge amounts of data and making sense of it all can take years and often needs a human eye to pick out the fine details. The Zooniverse unleashes an army of willing volunteers to pore over images and data sets. Galaxy Zoo members have now classified over 250 million galaxies. At the time of writing there are currently 656,773 people taking part in Zooniverse projects across the globe. Galaxy Zoo participants alone have contributed to more than 30 published scientific papers. One of the Zooniverse’s great strengths is the ability to throw up some unexpected discoveries like the now famous Hanny’s Voorwerp, named after Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel, the Galaxy Zoo volunteer who spotted it. Such a serendipitous discovery is possible when data is exposed to large numbers of users who are encouraged to flag up anything they think looks out of the ordinary.

To mark Galaxy Zoo’s 5th birthday there will be a relaunch of the project which will compare images using a new dataset from Hubble’s CANDELS survey of distant, early galaxies to what we see today.

The range of projects now available to members is extensive. Users of the Solar Stormwatch project analyse interactive diagrams produced by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO). Planet Hunters use data from Kepler to search for transiting exoplanets. The Milky Way Project users have access to image data from the Spitzer Space Telescope to identify infrared bubbles in the interstellar medium to help us understand how stars form. SETI Live searches for interesting signals coming from the Kepler Field. Moon Zoo participants use data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to catalogue features on the Moon down to the size of a wastepaper basket.

Away from space there are also projects involved in climate, nature and humanities. Old Weather is a project that models Earth’s climate using wartime shipping logs and Whale FM members listen to, and catagorize, the songs of Orcas to help understand what the whales are saying, while Ancient Lives gives participants the chance to decipher and study the Oxyrhynchus collection of papyri. The NEEMO project analyzes images of marine life and features taken from the underwater base at the National Marine Sanctuary in Key Largo, Florida. What’s the Score asks people to help describe over four thousand digitised musical scores made available by the Bodleian Libraries. With a global posse of citizen scientists eager to study real data at their disposal, the range of projects will likely grow over the coming years. So happy 5th Birthday Zooniverse and here’s to many more!

To find out more and how you can get involved visit the Zooniverse website

Lead image caption: Galaxies gone wild. Source NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA) ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)

On The Hunt For High-Altitude Microorganisms

Design of an XCOR Lynx spacecraft (XCOR Aerospace)

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The United States Rocket Academy has announced an open call for entries in its High Altitude Astrobiology Challenge, a citizen science project that will attempt to collect samples of microbes that may be lurking in Earth’s atmosphere at the edge of space.

Earth’s biosphere has been discovered to extend much higher than once thought — up to 100,000 feet (30,480 meters) above the planet’s surface. Any microorganisms present at these high altitudes could be subject to the mutating effects of increased radiation and transported around the globe in a sort of pathogenic jet-stream.

What sort of microbes may exist at the upper reaches of the atmosphere?

Citizens in Space, a project run by the U.S. Rocket Academy, is offering a $10,000 prize for the development of an open-source and replicable  collection device that could successfully retrieve samples of high-altitude microorganisms, and could fly as a payload aboard an XCOR Lynx spacecraft.

XCOR Aerospace is a private California-based company that has developed the Lynx, a reusable launch vehicle that has suborbital flight capabilities. Low-speed test flights are expected to commence later this year, with incremental testing to take place over the following months.

Any proposed microbe collection devices would have to fit within the parameters of the Lynx’s 2kg Aft Cowling Port payload capabilities — preferably a 10 x 10 x 20 cm CubeSat volume — and provide solutions for either its retraction (in the case of extended components) or retrieval (in the case of ejected hardware.)

The contest is open to any US resident or non-government team or organization, and submissions are due by February 13, 2013. The chosen design will fly on 10 contracted Lynx flights in late 2013 or early 2014, and possibly even future missions.

Find out more about the challenge on the Citizens in Space site here, and check out an animation of the XCOR Lynx spacecraft below:

Venus Transit — There’s an App for That!

Transit of Venus by NASA's TRACE spacecraft Image credit: NASA/LMSAL
Transit of Venus in 2004 by NASA's TRACE spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/LMSAL

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There have been only six Venus transits since the invention of the telescope in the early 17th century. It was not until 1761 that the transit of Venus on June 6th was observed as part of the first ever international scientific observation project, instigated by Edmond Halley. Astronomers across the globe viewed the transit and the differences in their observations were used to triangulate the distance to Venus and, using Kepler’s laws, the distance to the Sun, the other planets and the size of the Solar System. Though the method used has not changed in the 251 years since, the equipment most certainly has.

For this transit, we have technology on our side.

In previous Venus Transits, expeditions were sent out far and wide and the 1761 transit was eventually recorded by 120 individual astronomers from 62 locations across Europe, America, Asia and Africa. They used only the simple telescopes of the day, fitted with dense filters, a pendulum clock to time the transit and quadrants to determine their exact latitude and local time. It is hardly surprising that their observations varied widely. Their calculations put the Sun’s distance between 130 and 158 million kilometres.

Transits happen in pairs. After 121 years a transit occurs followed 8 years later by another, then 105 years pass before the next pair and then the pattern repeats. Prior to the transit of 2004 the most recent transit was in 1882. There were none during the whole of the 20th century! We now approach the last chance to view a transit in our lifetime, the next will not occur until 2117.

Luckily, we’ve got some newly developed technology to help make this the most-observed transit ever!

Astronomers Without Borders are part of the Transit of Venus Project to get as many people around the world to observe the transit and to participate in a collective experiment to measure the Sun’s distance. To this end they have produced the Venus Transit phone app, available to download free for both iTunes and Android. Once downloaded you can start to practice timing the interior contacts of ingress and egress using a simulation of the transit. This is not as easy as it seems, as the black drop effect makes precise timing tricky so practice is definitely recommended. The app will tell you how far out you are so that you can perfect your timing and it will also predict times of contact based on your location together with times of sunrise and sunset.

On the day of the transit, the app will record the exact GPS time and your location, which is sent to the global database. Afterwards you can access your data on the website’s map to edit your entry, and upload descriptions, text, images, or movies and view other entries as well. This transit will be visible over most of the Earth except for parts of West Africa and most of South America, so download, get practicing and become part of a once in a lifetime, global citizen science experiment!

Find out more at Transit of Venus

Help Track the Effects of Light Pollution with GLOBE at Night

Image Credit: GLOBE at Night/NOAO

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Going on right now is your last chance in 2012 to take just a few minutes to get involved in the GLOBE at Night campaign to measure the brightness of your night sky. GLOBE at Night is a citizen-science project to raise awareness of the impact of light pollution by inviting citizen-scientists to make naked-eye observations of the night sky in your area.

Here’s all the info you need in order to participate in GLOBE at Night:

Participating in GLOBE at Night requires only five easy steps:

1) Find your latitude and longitude.

2) Find Orion, Leo or Crux by going outside more than an hour after sunset (about 8-10pm local time).

3) Match your nighttime sky to one of the provided magnitude charts.

4) Report your observation.

5) Compare your observation to thousands around the world.

You can also use the new web application data submission process. The GLOBE at Night website is easy to use, comprehensive and holds an abundance of background information. The database is usable for comparisons with a variety of other databases, like how light pollution affects the foraging habits of bats.

People in 115 countries have contributed over 75,000 measurements during the past six years, making GLOBE at Night the most successful light pollution awareness campaign to date. So join in and help the cause!

Moon Mappers! Contribute to Lunar Science

Want to contribute to lunar science? The MoonMappers citizen science project is now live at CosmoQuest.org, and you can become part of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s science team by exploring high-resolution Lunar images and mapping out scientifically interesting features. MoonMappers has been in a testing phase since January, and during the beta period, early participants marked over 150,000 craters and more than 4,000 other interesting features. With your help, scientists will be able to better determine ages of different regions, find historic spikes in the impact rate, determine lunar regolith depth and what may lie under the crust, and make conclusions about the physics of giant explosions on the Moon’s surface.

“Craters can reveal all sorts of different properties about the Moon and planetary surfaces in general,” said project co-science lead Stuart Robbins, from the Southwest Research Institute.
Continue reading “Moon Mappers! Contribute to Lunar Science”