Last month, I wrote a diary about the 8 citizen science projects available at Zooniverse.
A new project was launched last Tuesday by the Zooniverse team called
IceHunters.
More about this project, how it works, and opportunities for you to guide a space craft are below the squiggle.
The New Horizons Mission to Pluto
In 2006, NASA dispatched an ambassador to the planetary frontier. The New Horizons spacecraft is now halfway between Earth and Pluto, on approach for a dramatic flight past the icy planet and its moons in July 2015.
After 10 years and more than 3 billion miles, on a historic voyage that has already taken it over the storms and around the moons of Jupiter, New Horizons will shed light on new kinds of worlds we've only just discovered on the outskirts of the solar system.
New Horizons is packed with seven instruments selected to meet the mission's science goals.
With New Horizons, NASA set out a list of things it (and the planetary science community) wanted to know about Pluto: What is its atmosphere made of, and how does it behave? What does the surface of Pluto look like? Are there big geological structures? How do particles ejected from the sun (known as the solar wind) interact with Pluto's atmosphere?
The Kuiper Belt and KBO
Arrival at Pluto is approaching with great anticipation. But, that will not be the end of the mission. The spacecraft will continue to coast from the Sun into a region called the Kuiper Belt.
The Kuiper Belt is a region of space in our solar system, shaped more like an ellipse than a circle, which is similar to an asteroid belt. While the asteroid belt is mostly metal and rock, the Kuiper Belt is composed almost entirely of icy chunks of various substances. Actually, the makeup of Kuiper Belt Objects KBO is similar to the composition of comets – a mixture of frozen water, ammonia and various hydrocarbons, such as methane.
This region is located approximately 30 to 50 AU (astronomical units) from the Sun. Each astronomical unit is equivalent to the distance from the Earth to the Sun, so the region is 4.5 billion km to 7.4 billion km from the Sun. Scientists believe that there are over 70,000 objects in the Kuiper Belt, although astronomers have found a fraction so far. Some of these Kuiper Belt objects, KBOs, are massive. In fact, the dwarf planet Pluto is thought to be one of the objects in the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is the largest known KBO, but there are a number of other objects of substantial size. Quaoar is more than half the size of Pluto, and Makemake and Haumea are much closer in size to Pluto. A number of KBOs, including Pluto and Haumea, also have satellites.
Here is Where Zooniverse Enters the Picture
With IceHunters, images of the sky in the vicinity of the Pluto and New Horizons encounter are visually scanned by thousands of volunteers who are part of this crowd sourcing project. These images will contain Kuiper Belt objects KBO. New Horizons may be redirected toward one or two of them.
After passing Pluto and Charon, pending NASA approval of an extended mission, the spacecraft can retarget itself for an encounter with a KBO. The KBO target will not be selected until shortly before the Pluto encounter, but scientists hope to find one or more that the spacecraft can reach that are at least 30 miles (about 50 kilometers) across. This encounter would be similar to the Pluto-Charon encounter; the spacecraft would map the KBO with high resolution images, investigate its composition using infrared spectroscopy and four-color maps, and look for an atmosphere and moons.
This is where you come in. To find these icy KBO targets we need your help poring over thousands of ground based images, taken specially for this purpose using giant telescopes. Hiding within these images are undiscovered slow-moving Kuiper Belt Objects, asteroids zipping through the foreground, and millions of background stars.
I participated in beta testing of the site in the past 2 months. It is well designed by the team of Dr. Pamela Gay and Corey Lehan of Southern Illinois University. Their hard work has produced an easy to use and effective interface for searching for and identifying potential KBO candidates.
What is the Science in the Image Analysis?
The images were taken by the 8-meter Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, or the 6.5-meter Magellan telescope in Chile. The same star regions were imaged a few days or weeks apart. The images were balanced for brightness and contrast. Then the images were overlaid and subtracted. Objects which don't move like stars will effectively disappear. Objects which do move will appear in different locations. What is left in the final product is an image with most bright stars subtracted out of the blotchy field. But there are some asteroids, KBO, and variable stars still clearly present. Those are viewed and marked by the large number of volunteers in the Zooniverse membership.
For example, here is a potential KBO marked with a circle.
Here is likely an asteroid noted by the 3 fuzzy dots in a row when 3 images were subtracted.
Most of these asteroids are known. Some will be newly discovered by the IceHunters volunteers. They will receive credit as an official discoverer of the new asteroid.
Please Join the Zooniverse Project
Sign up and take part in this new project or one of the eight other projects. Citizen science is a lot of fun and can help advance the research more quickly due to the large numbers of volunteers.