image via Lunar and Planetary Institute and G. Bacon (STScI)

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 classify will help advance lunar science – providing new insights into the geological history of the Moon. Your help is also needed in identifying which parts of the Moon are covered with boulders so as to create lunar landing hazard maps for future spacecraft and human exploration missions. Of course, in exploring the lunar surface, who knows what else you might find – the hope is that Moon Zoo will lead to the discovery of many unusual features.

Craters on the lunar surface stay almost until eternity due to the lack of weather-based erosion, thus the number of craters on a surface area tells how old it is.  This technique is used all over the Solar System, but the Moon is particularly important because of a ground truth — samples brought back by the Apollo missions — which allow for calibrating any estimates. You can see examples of these types of things on the tutorial page.

Project owners + coordinators:
Moon Zoo team, team@moonzoo.org

To learn more and participate, visit: http://moonzoo.org

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow @moonzoo
• read blogs.zooniverse.org/moonzoo
• join forum.moonzoo.org

Image via Ferenc Gál

MiniSpaceWorld aims to create a spectacular scale model world for space flight and astronomy. Light and sound effects, day and night simulations in the different Worlds, historical and modern vehicles in motion, and representation of future life scenes will enrich the visitors’ experience. Under the motto “Space for Everybody”, MiniSpaceWorld will also explicitly feature products already use in our everyday life today that originated from space activities.

The MSW Design Contest is a contest open for participants worldwide about imagining various parts of MiniSpaceWorld, a lively scale model exhibit about spaceflight and astronomy. Participants shall create a high-level content design including a theme description, map and graphical representations. The themes covered by MSW are extremely rich and vivid, with billions of lovely facets: this is without doubt true also for our closest celestial companion – our Moon, which is the topic of the 2010 Design Contest. The themes of the design are free to choose: they can feature historical missions like the Apollo flights or the Lunokhod, imagine first permanent colonies, show a complete “Moon city” with all the necessary facilities, or present future activities like regolith processing and mining of various minerals.

Project owners + coordinators:
Dr. Tibor Pacher

To learn more and participate by September 30, 2010, visit: the MSW Design Contest Overview

photo via Richard Bell

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 volunteering a percentage of your computer’s unused operating power, your computer will focus on mapping out a small section of our galaxy. MilkyWay@Home’s data, source code, research and results are open source and available for public use.
In general, an astrophysics problem revolves around creating a computer system model that will replicate what we see in the sky – if a model matches exactly then we can leapfrog off that information to work on a bigger, more involved problem. MilkyWay@Home is currently focusing on the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how our galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge. The general idea is that our galaxy actually has smaller galaxies mixed within it, probably from galactic collisions in ancient history. Mapping the dynamics of such interstellar streams is expected to provide crucial clues for understanding the evolution of the Milky Way and similar galaxies. It could also provide insight on dark matter.

This project also enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science. Astroinformatics is a rising field at the interface between Computer Science and Astronomy with new discoveries made possible by the abundance in galactic data created by the SDSS. As of January 2010, MilkyWay@Home has 44,900 users and 1,590 teams in 170 countries, with an average computing power of 1,382 TeraFlops. This ranks MilkyWay@Home second amongst the Top 500 list of supercomputers.

Project owners + coordinators:
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s departments of Computer Science and Physics/Astronomy
Travis Desell, Graduate Research Assistant in Computer Science
Dave Przybylo, Undergraduate Research Assistant in Computer Science
Nathan Cole, Graduate Research Assistant in Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy
Malik Magdon-Ismail, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Heidi Newberg, Associate Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy
Boleslaw Szymanski, Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor of Computer Science
Carlos Varela, Associate Professor of Computer Science

To learn more, visit: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu

To participate:
• download and run BOINC, then select Attach to Project and when prompted, enter http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/
• to optimize your computer for contributing to MilkyWay@Home, you will need to have BOINC running in the background while leaving your computer on for at least 24 hours

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• join milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/forum_index.php

Photo by NASA

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 measurements.

Even on a quiet day, the Sun’s a whirling ball of energy – intense magnetic fields churn and pummel its atmosphere. But sometimes, huge solar explosions hurl billions of tons of material across the solar system and out into space. Scientists call them coronal mass ejections, or CMEs for short. We call them solar storms – and scientists need your help to discover how they begin and evolve, as well as forecast their arrival time at Earth.

Solar storms on a collision course with Earth are harmful to astronauts in orbit and have the potential to knock out communication satellites, disrupt mobile phone networks and damage power lines. On the plus side, they also spark the beautiful atmospheric reactions better known as the northern and southern lights, or aurora.

The project uses near-real time data from space. Every hour NASA’s STEREO spacecraft, a pair of satellites in orbit around the Sun, send a compressed ‘beacon mode’ data packet back to Earth. This means you can help detect Earth-bound solar storms up to three days before they reach us. These detections get pinged to Twitter as a space weather forecast.

Solar Stormwatch was created by The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in partnership with the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Zooniverse (the Galaxy Zoo team at Oxford University).

Project owners + coordinators:
Fiona Romeo, Royal Observatory Greenwich
Natasha Waterson, Royal Observatory Greenwich


To learn more and participate, visit: http://solarstormwatch.com

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow @solarstormwatch
• read blogs.zooniverse.org/solarstormwatch
• join forum.solarstormwatch.com
• look at flickr.com/photos/solarstormwatch

The Collaborative Space Travel and Research Team (CSTART) is a non-government, non-profit, collaborative space agency whose mission is is to organize and finance the efforts of space enthusiasts around the world who are interested in using collaborative design, volunteer labor, innovative, low-cost technology and open data sharing to further the cause of manned and unmanned space exploration and research. Participation is encouraged for anyone who wishes to contribute in any small or large, but meaningful way.

CSTART creates open source plans for space travel and research projects, ranging from simple sounding rockets (the OHKLA project) all the way up to manned moon landings (the CLLARE project). They write open source software, including software to help plan space missions, software to run on spacecraft and software to help track and communicate with spacecraft from the ground. CSTART is dedicated to open source design principles, using freely available and open source tools wherever possible, and easily available resources where an open source alternative does not exist.

Team members are located around the globe, and are experts in many different areas: physics and engineering, law and business, graphic design, and everything in between. You don’t need to be a scientist or engineer to be involved in CSTART: they need people with experience in business, marketing, law, graphic design and other fields just as much as they need rocket scientists!

Project owners + coordinators:
Luke Maurits, acting director
Ben Miller-Jacobson, acting director
Titan Miller, acting director
Rizwan Memon, acting director
Ryan Pulkrabek, acting director

To learn more and participate, visit: http://cstart.org

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow @cstartorg
• read cstart.org/blog
• join cstart.org/forum
• explore cstart.org/wiki

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 new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat. And, best of all, the price of the TubeSat kit actually includes the price of a launch into Low-Earth-Orbit on an IOS NEPTUNE 30 launch vehicle. Since the TubeSats are placed into self-decaying orbits 310 kilometers (192 miles) above the Earth’s surface, they do not contribute to the long-term build-up of orbital debris. After operating for a few months (the exact length of time on orbit is dependent on solar activity), they will safely re-enter the atmosphere and burn-up. TubeSats are designed to be orbit-friendly. Launches are expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Total Price of the TubeSat Kit including a Launch to Orbit is $8,000 USD.

Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite’s structural components, safety hardware, solar panels, batteries, power management hardware and software, transceiver, antennas, microcomputer, and the required programming tools. With these components alone, the builder can construct a satellite that puts out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver. Simple applications include broadcasting a repeating message from orbit or programming the satellite to function as a private orbital amateur radio relay station. These are just two examples. The TubeSat also allows the builder to add his or her own experiment or function to the basic TubeSat Kit. Examples of add-on experiments or applications include the following:

Earth-from-space video imaging, Earth magnetic field measurement, satellite orientation detection (horizon sensor, gyros, accelerometers, etc.), orbital environment measurements (temperature, pressure, radiation, etc.), on-orbit hardware and software component testing (microprocessors, etc.), tracking migratory animals from orbit, testing satellite stabilization methods, biological experiments, on-orbit advertising, private e-mail, space art, space burials.

If specified, Interorbital can supply an empty external shell with component rack at a lower cost. This allows advanced TubeSat developers to replace the standard kit components with their own hardware.

Project owners + coordinators:
Randa Milliron

To learn more and order a kit, visit: http://interorbital.com/TubeSat_1.htm

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: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originate in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such pristine particles ever collected in space, and scientists are eagerly waiting for their chance to “get their hands” on them.

Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains will have to be found. This will not be easy. They are tiny-only about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size! These miniscule particles are embedded in an aerogel collector 1,000 square centimeters in size. To make things worse the collector plates are interspersed with flaws, cracks, and an uneven surface. All this makes the interstellar dust particles extremely difficult to locate.

If we were doing this project twenty years ago, we would have searched for the tracks through a high-magnification microscope. Because the view of the microscope is so small, we would have to move the microscope more than 1.6 million times to search the whole collector.  This is so much work, that even starting twenty years ago, we would still be doing it today!

This is where you come in:
By asking for help from talented volunteers like you from all over the world, we can do this project in months instead of years. To find the elusive particles we are using an automated scanning microscope to automatically collect images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector at the Curatorial Facility at Johnson Space Center in Houston. We call these stacks of images focus movies. All in all there will be nearly a million such focus movies. These are available to Stardust@home users like you around the world. You can then view them with the aid of a special Virtual Microscope (VM) that works in your web browser.

In recognition of the critical importance of the Stardust@home volunteers, the discoverer of an interstellar dust particle will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer will also have the privilege of naming the particle! To also recognize the efforts of our volunteers who work hard, but may not have found a particle, we will invite the top-ranked volunteers to come visit our lab in Berkeley for a special tour. (Unfortunately, we are legally precluded from covering travel expenses.)

Project owners + coordinators:
The Stardust@Home Team

To participate and learn more, visit: http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• join stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum

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 analyze natural radio emissions of Jupiter, the Sun, and our galaxy. Participants also collaborate with each other through interactions and sharing of data on the network.

The Radio JOVE project began in 1998. Since then, more than 1100 teams of students and interested individuals have purchased our non-profit radio telescope kits and are learning radio astronomy by building and operating a radio telescope. This self-supporting program continues to thrive and inspire new groups of students as well as individuals.

Project owners + coordinators:
Radio JOVE project office

To learn more and participate, visit: http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov

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 technology can people make correct decisions in their lives, public, professional, and private. INSPIRE (Interactive NASA Space Physics Ionosphere Radio Experiment) also is an innovative, unique opportunity for students to actively gather data that might be used in a basic research project. The INSPIRE project uses build-it-yourself kits to measure and record VLF emissions such as tweeks, whistlers, sferics, and chorus along with man-made emissions.

Project owners + coordinators:
Kathleen Franzen, president

To learn more, visit: http://theinspireproject.org

To participate, order a kit at: http://theinspireproject.org/index.php?page=order_vlf_receiver_kits

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• connect with facebook.com/pages/The-Inspire-Project-Inc/103161976385633

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 approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver’s electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power. Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.

Project owners + coordinators:
SETI@home project personnel

To learn more and participate, visit: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• join setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_community.php