‘Citizen scientists’ map asteroids, galaxies and catalogue Mars

One of the biggest problems that astronomers and planetary scientists face these days is just how much data their observations and surveys generate. Going through it all themselves would take far too much time, so more and more they are turning to citizen scientists for help.

SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, has been doing this since 1999 with its SETI@Home program. It has limited computer power to process all the data the scientists've gathered. So it designed a free program for people to install on their home computers to download and process data packets, either constantly or only as screensavers, when the computers aren't being used otherwise. Essentially, this gave the SETI scientists access to a massive virtual super computer to process their data.

More recently, other projects have been taking advantage of this idea, but have been asking for more direct input from the public.

NASA's Be A Martian program asks people to help examine the vast amount of data that has been gathered about Mars by orbiting spacecraft and planetary rovers. A user can start up an account as a 'Martian Citizen' and help catalogue craters and other formations seen from orbit or explore the surface and identify objects captured by the cameras of Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity.

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The CosmoQuest community combines three different citizen scientist astronomy missions: Vesta Mappers, Moon Mappers and Ice Investigators. Vesta Mappers allows you to be one of the first to access new data from NASA's Dawn mission, to catalogue craters on the surface of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in the solar system. Moon Mappers is another crater cataloguing program that contains all the images taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft, which is currently in a polar orbit of the Moon. Ice Investigators is using data from NASA's New Horizons mission, taking images of the outer-reaches of our solar system. It is scheduled to rendezvous with Pluto in 2015, but on its way, it is in search of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a ring-shaped region of the solar system that extends from the orbit of Neptune and contains many icy objects. The most famous of these are the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris.

Another @Home program is for NASA's StarDust mission, which was sent into the coma of Comet Wild 2 (pronounced 'Vilt') to capture dust particles in cells of aerogel. The StarDust@Home program uses stacks of images, called 'Focus Movies', which let a user change what depth of the cell they are focusing on, to search for the tracks that dust particles made as they impacted with the collector.

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The latest project to call for citizen scientists is Galaxy Zoo. Started in 2007, more than 250,000 people have catalogued and classified over 1 million galactic images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Now the project is launching its next stage, as more images from the Hubble Space Telescope survey are added — over 250,000 images so far.

Oxford University's Dr. Chris Lintott, the principle investigator of Galaxy Zoo, had this message for volunteers. "We'd like to thank all those that have taken part in Galaxy Zoo in the past five years. Humans are better than computers at pattern recognition tasks like this, and we couldn't have got so far without everyone's help. Now we've got a new challenge and we'd like to encourage volunteers old and new to get involved. You don't have to be an expert — in fact we've found not being an expert tends to make you better at this task. There are too many images for us to inspect ourselves, but by asking hundreds of thousands of people to help us we can find out what's lurking in the data."

Galaxy Zoo is part of the Zooniverse collection of citizen science projects.

Although using citizen scientists has caused some concern about the validity of the data and some projects are not suited for volunteer work, Dr. Lintott's message easily applies to any of these citizen science programs. There is just so much data being collected that it would take years, sometimes hundreds of years, for a small research team to go through it all. Recruiting public volunteers substantially reduces that time and allows for quicker results and a better advancement of the science. It also gets people more involved in science, even if it's just as a part-time hobby.

If any of these projects interest you, please sign up and help them out! You may help make some amazing discoveries, you might even get to name something!