Spacehack

a directory of ways to participate in space exploration

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University Rover Challenge

competition / engineering

An annual competition for college students to design and build the next generation of Mars rovers that will one day work alongside astronauts on the Red Planet. Former students and community members alike are encouraged to reach out to their alma matters and local universities to help form teams. [...]

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Spacelog

open source / mission control

A volunteer project to bring to life early manned space flight in a searchable, linkable format. In fifty years since mankind began to explore in person the universe outside our home planet, there have been many memorable moments, of beauty, of bravery, and occasionally of tragedy. For those who did not live through them it is [...]

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Constellation

distributed computing / aerospace engineering

A community that provides distributed computing power to aerospace research projects that might not otherwise have access to supercomputers due to financial, administrative or bureaucratic reasons. By volunteering a percentage of your computer’s unused operating power, your computer will focus on a variety of tasks from [...]

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Planet Hunters

data analysis / exoplanets

Help discover new exoplanets (aka extrasolar planets/planets orbiting other stars) by exploring space telescope data from NASA’s Kepler mission. Planet Hunters is an online experiment that taps into the power of human pattern recognition. The data consists of brightness measurements, or “light curves”, taken [...]

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Galaxy Zoo

data analysis / galaxies

To understand different types of galaxies and how galaxies form, Galaxy Zoo: Hubble needs your help classifying images of hundreds of thousands of galaxies taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. If you’re quick, you may even be the first person in history to see each of the galaxies you’re asked to classify. [...]

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NASA World Wind

open source / visualization

An open source 3D interactive world viewer created by NASA’s Learning Technologies project, released in mid-2004. It is now developed by NASA staff and open source community developers. World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar [...]

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Citizen Sky

data analysis / stars

Epsilon Aurigae is a supergiant star located 2,000 light years from Earth that mysteriously gets eclipsed every 27.1 years by an equally large unknown dark object. The event has baffled scientists since 1821, but through the Citizen Sky project, you’ll make observations and analyses that could decipher this scientific puzzle! [...]

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TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit

hardware / tubesats

Build and launch your own satellite into space! One of the primary missions at Interorbital is to provide satellite hardware and launch support for the experimental and commercial satellite community. Planet Earth has entered the age of the Personal Satellite with the introduction of Interorbital’s TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit. The [...]

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Moon Zoo

data analysis / lunar

A citizen science project around classifying high resolution images of craters and various parts of the lunar surface taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) via the Planetary Data System (PDS). From billion-year-old volcanic eruptions and curving lava channels to recent asteroid impacts, the images you [...]

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MilkyWay@Home

distributed computing / galaxies

MilkyWay@home is a distributed computing project, harnessing the power of volunteered computers to create a highly accurate 3D model of the Milky Way galaxy. The project uses data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. By [...]

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Solar Stormwatch

data analysis / solar storms

Learn how to spot solar explosions and track them across space to Earth. Your work could make a new scientific discovery as well as give astronauts an early warning if dangerous radiation is headed their way. You’ll also find out how to pinpoint comets, particle strikes and optical effects, and how to make detailed storm [...]

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Stardust@Home

data analysis / interstellar dust

Together, you and thousands of other Stardust@Home participants will find the first pristine interstellar dust particles ever brought to Earth. Nestled within the Stardust spacecraft’s capsule in 2006 were precious particles collected during its dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 and something else, even rarer and no less precious: [...]

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Radio JOVE

education / radio astronomy

The Radio JOVE project is a hands-on inquiry-based educational project that allows students, teachers and the general public to learn about radio astronomy by building their own radio telescope from an inexpensive kit and/or using remote radio telescopes through the internet. Radio JOVE students and amateur scientists observe and [...]

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INSPIRE Project

education / radio astronomy

A non-profit scientific, educational project whose objective is to bring the excitement of observing natural and man-made radio waves to high school students. Underlying this objective is the conviction that science and technology are the underpinnings of our modern society, and that only with an understanding of science and [...]

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SETI@home

distributed computing / extraterrestrials

In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One [...]

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Global Telescope Network

data analysis / astrophysics

A project that allows individuals or groups to dedicate some portion of their time to analyzing data taken with other people’s telescopes. The Global Telescope Network is a network of small telescopes around the world for the purpose of supporting the science of NASA and ESA high energy astrophysics missions, including [...]

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My NASA Data

education / earth

Mentoring and inquirY using NASA Data for Atmospheric and earth science for Teachers and Amateurs (MY NASA DATA) is a project to enable K-12 teachers and students, as well as citizen scientists, to explore the large volumes of data that NASA collects about the Earth from space. A main goal of the MY NASA DATA project is to remove [...]

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Flight Analogs Project

data analysis / human space flight

Help NASA get astronauts to the Moon and Mars. Future space exploration will challenge NASA to answer many critical questions about how humans can live and work for extended missions away from Earth. Currently, researchers are working to reduce the effects of space flight on the human body. To accomplish this, [...]

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Vision Workbench

open source / imaging

The VW is a general purpose image processing and computer vision library developed by the Autonomous Systems and Robotics (ASR) Area in the Intelligent Systems Division at the NASA Ames Research Center. VW has been publically released under the terms of the NASA Open Source Software Agreement. They are [...]

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Telescope Makers’ Workshop

education / telescopes

Open to all ages and free to attend, the Telescope Makers’ Workshop is an all-volunteer group committed to helping people build their own telescopes. Bring your interest and curiosity, and they’ll provide knowledge, enthusiasm, and advice to help you complete your telescope-making projects. No experience necessary. [...]

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Open Luna Foundation

A stepped program of robotic missions that seek to return mankind to the lunar surface, and to do it in such a way that it is accessible to everyone. The Open Luna Foundation is open source and invites everyone (hardware providers, writers, wiki-editors, designers, etc.) to contribute and share what you want to do and [...]

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Mars Student Imaging Project

education / mars

NASA and Arizona State University’s Mars Education Program is offering students in the U.S. the opportunity to be involved in authentic Mars research by participating in the Mars Student Imaging Project (MSIP). Teams of students in grades 5 through college sophomore level will have the opportunity to work with scientists, mission [...]

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DASHlink

data analysis / aeronautics

A virtual laboratory for scientists and engineers to disseminate results and collaborate on research problems in health management technologies for aeronautics systems. DASHlink (Discovery in Aeronautics Systems Health) supports innovation by allowing researchers to overcome the limitations of distance and disparate [...]

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Celestia

open source / visualization

An open-source, photo-realistic, real-time, three-dimensional viewing of the solar system, the galaxy and the universe. Celestia is an easy to use, freely-distributed, multi-platform, open source, software package which has become a valuable tool for astronomy education. Used in homes, schools, museums and planetariums around [...]

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ISS EarthKAM

education / earth

A NASA education program that provides unique, high quality photographs of our planet taken by middle school students. Using the web to direct a digital camera on space flights and the International Space Station, select middle schools request images based upon their classroom investigations. Teachers, school [...]

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Great World Wide Star Count

education / stars

This project was designed to encourage students, families and interested citizens to record observations of the quality of their nighttime sky (including specific constellations – Cygnus in the Northern Hemisphere, Sagittarius in the Southern Hemisphere) and share that data with others via the GWWSC website. Interested [...]

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PlanetQuest Collaboratory

data analysis / astronomy

The PlanetQuest Collaboratory will turn your computer (Mac, PC, Linux, and others) into a virtual astronomical observatory that you can use to make and share real scientific discoveries. Our telescopes are focused on extremely dense star regions, such as the center of the galaxy in Sagittarius, and when an observing run [...]

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setiQuest

setiQuest is a community involvement led by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute that aims to lead to a significant improvement in the ability to search for other intelligent civilizations in the cosmos. You can participate as a software developer or creative data parser. [...]

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Night Sky Network

event / astronomy

A network of amateur astronomy clubs around the U.S. who hold events for the public (e.g. star parties, planetarium shows, classrooms, etc.). The Night Sky Network is a nationwide coalition that regularly shares their knowledge, time, and telescopes to bring amazing aspects of astronomy to you (it’s essentially a [...]

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