A project where you can help create a better understanding of how the Milky Way evolves over time and potentially make new unexpected scientific discoveries. The Milky Way Project aims to sort and measure our galaxy and the characteristics of its cold, dusty material that is so important to creating stars.

The project calls on people to find bubbles, star clusters and unusual characteristics in infrared images acquired from the Spitzer Space Telescope. These bubbles (or clouds) are part of the life cycle of stars – often containing several hundred to several thousand young stars. Some bubbles have already been found by a study that inspired this project. By finding more bubbles, you can help map star formation in the Milky Way. As well as bubbles, knots and stars clusters there are other objects hidden throughout these images such as young stars, supernova remnants and never-before-seen galaxies. If you see anything unusual in the images, make sure to mark it using the ‘areas’ tool. The hope is to map out these objects and then use your discoveries to make more observations. You might even discover something we didn’t expect.

Soon, the next update to the Milky Way Project will involve hunting for young stellar objects in similar data.

Project owners + coordinators:
The Milky Way Project Team

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

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/milkywayproj
• subscribe to blog.milkywayproject.org

Citizen scientists discover more than 5,000 bubbles, creating a much-improved catalog to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Read about it.

An effort to discover new neutron stars (massive stars that have collapsed under their own weight) and hopefully directly detect one of Albert Einstein’s predictions for the first time: gravitational waves. Directly detecting these ripples in the curvature of spacetime would open up a new window on the universe, and usher in a new era in astronomy. Einstein@Home uses your computer’s idle time to search for weak astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, the Arecibo radio telescope, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

More than 250,000 individuals have contributed so far and the aggregate computational power is on par with the largest supercomputers. Einstein@Home volunteers have already discovered more than a dozen new neutron stars and hope to find many more. The project is hosted by the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover, Germany).

Project owners + coordinators:
Bruce Allen, director

To learn more, visit: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu

To participate:
• download and run BOINC, then select Attach to Project and when prompted, enter http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/einsteinathome
• join einstein.phys.uwm.edu/forum_index.php

Two Einstein@Home volunteers have discovered a new radio pulsar! Read about it.

Help search for life on another planet by analyzing potential alien signals coming from within our galaxy. SETILive is taking the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) directly to you by presenting radio frequency signals LIVE from the SETI Institute‘s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) while it’s pointed at stars that have the best chances of being home to an alien civilization.

Your participation can directly affect where the telescopes look - if enough people see a potential extraterrestrial (ET) signal in the same data, then within minutes, the ATA will be interrupted and sent back to take a second look. One of the hardest parts of hunting for signals from space is separating what might be an ET signal from the earth-based Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) sources. We think that human eyes, and our amazing brains, should be better than a computer at finding interesting signals in the noise.

Project owners + coordinators:
The SETILive Team

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

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/setilive
• subscribe to blogs.zooniverse.org/seti
• connect with facebook.com/pages/SETI-Live

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 sometimes difficult to appreciate the excitement of these early flights. Spacelog aims to bring those missions back to life: a website for exploring manned space missions through transcripts of conversations from during the flights between those in space and those back on the ground, and from photography taken at the time.

To date there have been over two hundred human spaceflight missions. Only a small number of these are currently available on Spacelog, although we’d be delighted for assistance in getting more up and alive. For NASA missions, the transcripts Spacelog works from were prepared in the 60s and 70s; from there, they’ve been scanned, converted to text, and then cleaned up by Spacelog volunteers. There are a whole bundle of different tasks that people can help out on, from the very small (such as noticing and pointing out a problem with a transcription of a particular mission) up to the fairly large (transcribing an entire mission). Along the way there are jobs involving writing new material (biographies, descriptions of key moments and phases, and so on), selecting images for use in missions (and possibly cropping or preparing them in Photoshop), and if you’re a programmer you can get hold of the source code behind the site, and help develop Spacelog further.

In general, the first step in getting involved is simply to tell Spacelog you’re around and interested. Drop an email to the spacelog@googlegroups.com mailing list, and ask any questions you need to get started. If you use IRC, the team tends to hang out on #spacelog, which can be more useful if you need to ask a number of related questions.

Project owners + coordinators:
The Spacelog Team

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

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/spacelog
• join groups.google.com/group/spacelog
• chat on irc://irc.freenode.net/#spacelog

A collection of hi-res photos from the Gemini project, NASA’s second human spaceflight program, have been released in an online archive by NASA and Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

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 modeling the Moon’s surface to simulating various spacecraft, thus expediting fundamental and applicable research.

The combined power of all volunteering users will help to solve important scientific tasks for both students and professionals in fields from astronomy to aerospace engineering. The bottom line is to benefit from the generosity of the volunteers and to benefit from the accumulation of different projects, like sharing programming knowledge in distributed computing and influencing the others’ simulation by its own solutions.

The Constellation platform uses BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing) and is an open space for anyone who is an air and space enthusiast that wants to donate idle computing time or even skill for a sub-project on platform. Get in touch with the Constellation project coordinators if you need computing power for your own simulation.

Project owners + coordinators:
The Constellation Team

To learn more, visit: http://aerospaceresearch.net/constellation

To participate:
• download and run BOINC, then select Attach to Project and when prompted, enter http://aerospaceresearch.net/constellation/

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/ardnnews
• join aerospaceresearch.net/constellation/forum_index.php
• connect with facebook.com/pages/AerospaceResearchnet

Watch the latest presentation from the Constellation team at the Chaos Computer Club‘s 28c3 event:

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 every thirty minutes for more than 150,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation. The Kepler team has been developing computer algorithms to analyze light curve data because it is not possible for them to visually inspect every light curve. In a sense, the Planet Hunters team is pitting human versus machine, betting that there will be planets which can only be found via the remarkable human ability for pattern recognition.

You will be looking at changes in star brightness at a level that has never before been seen. As a participant, you’ll search for possible transit events – a brief dip in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of the star – with the goal of discovering an exoplanet (hence the name “Planet Hunters”).

Participants are considered partners with the Planet Hunters science team, who will obtain follow up observations at the telescope based on analyzing participants’ assessments. What happens if you are the first person to discover a new exoplanet? If the Planet Hunters science team is able to confirm it’s real (by checking the Kepler team’s existing exoplanet list and obtaining spectroscopic data using the Keck telescope in Hawaii), you’ll be invited to be a co-author on a discovery paper submitted for publication.

Project owners + coordinators:
The Planet Hunters team, team@planethunters.org

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

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow @planethunters
• read blogs.zooniverse.org/planethunters
• connect with facebook.com/pages/PlanetHunters/168325563205996

Two new exoplanets discovered by Planet Hunters volunteers! Read about it.

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.

Your job is very simple! All you need to do is look out for the features that mark out spiral and elliptical galaxies. There’s a tutorial showing how to classify galaxies according to shape (elliptical, spiral or irregular) and rotation (clockwise or anti-clockwise).

Those involved are directly contributing to scientific research, while getting an opportunity to view the beautiful and varied galaxies that inhabit our universe. Why does Galaxy Zoo need people to do this, rather than just using a computer? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer. Galaxies are complicated objects that vary in appearance enormously, and yet in some ways they can be very similar.

More than 250,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. This latest incarnation of Galaxy Zoo uses data from the Hubble Space Telescope to go deeper than ever before. Read ‘The Story So Far’ to find out what has been achieved to date with Galaxy Zoo 1 and Galaxy Zoo 2.

Project owners + coordinators:
Galaxy Zoo Team, team@galaxyzoo.org

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

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow @galaxyzoo
• read galaxyzooblog.org
• join galaxyzooforum.org
• connect with facebook.com/galaxy-zoo-hubble-edition

Galaxy Zoo users discover an entirely new set of galaxies and a strange outer space phenomenon. Read about it.

The strange phenomenon, known as Hanny’s Voorwerp, named after the Galaxy Zoo user who discovered it. Credit: NASA, ESA, W.Keel (Univ. Alabama), et al., Galaxy Zoo Team

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 Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.

World Wind provides geospatial visualization technology via extensible and modular components that can be incorporated into any application. World Wind spurs innovation by involving the world community in advancing this cross-platform Java-based technology.

Project owners + coordinators:
Patrick Hogan, project manager
Randy Kim
Chris Maxwell
Tom Gaskins
Bruce Lam

To learn more and participate, visit:
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• join forum.worldwindcentral.com
• explore worldwindcentral.com/wiki

Company uses NASA World Wind to aid earthquake rescue operations in Chile and in Haiti. Read about it.

Epsilon Aurigae artwork by Brian Thieme

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!

The next eclipse of Epsilon Aurigae began in August 2009 and will continue into 2011. The Citizen Sky project provides you with a finder chart and tutorials so you can collect and contribute scientific data to help solve the mystery. Epsilon Aurigae is a variable star—this means it changes in brightness over time. Collecting data on these changes can help us understand the star. No equipment or prior experience is required; the star is so bright in fall, winter and spring that it can be observed by anyone with a good pair of eyes, even in the most light-polluted cities.

Project owners + coordinators:
Citizen Sky team, (email form)

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

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• subscribe to citizensky.org/category/newsletter/citizen-sky-newsletter
• read citizensky.org/blog
• join citizensky.org/forum

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