Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

Calling All Planetary Scientists

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Mavericks Lab

Project: Mavericks Lab

Mavericks Lab, an applied research accelerator, is looking for a few good planetary scientists.

The Lab is a 6 week interdisciplinary accelerator that will bring together Planetary Scientists and Data Scientists to work on NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge.

It will run in conjunction with NASA Ames and SETI, from June 27th to August 5th 2016 and candidates will be provided with transport, lodging and a stipend.

Mentorship will be provided by representatives from SETI, NVidia, Autodesk, Google, and NASA.

The application deadline is April 24th, 2016, so if you’re interested, act fast!

 

 

 

Hunt For Asteroids… At Your Desk

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Asteroids, we have a few. (Image credit: NASA)
Asteroids, we have a few. (Image credit: NASA)

Project: Asteroid Data Hunter App

A citizen science challenge has spawned a citizen science app.

In 2014, NASA announced an Asteroid Grand Challenge. In a series of contests, participants were asked to develop improved algorithms to find asteroids in telescope images. The challenge offered more than $50,000 in prizes, and concluded in December.

The winning solutions from each contest have now been combined to produce a desktop application to hunt asteroids. The app is available for Windows (7.1+) and Mac (10.2.X+) users, with a Linux Ubuntu version coming soon. You can grab the app at this link.

Astronomers search for asteroids by comparing images taken of the same piece of sky over time, to see what has moved. This used to be done by hand, but with the proliferation of quality imagery from a number of ground-based telescopes, there is now a glut of data to mine. Computers can process data imagery very quickly… with the right algorithm.

Asteroids are a major focus for NASA right now. Asteroids have struck Earth in the past, often with devastating consequences. One of the best known recent impacts was the Tunguska event, where an impact or explosion knocked down millions of trees over a huge section of Siberia in 1908.

On the positive side, we may soon be able to capture asteroids to mine them for their resources, both for use here on Earth, and to help establish colonies on other planets or moons. Asteroids are known to contain water (in the form of ice), and elements like iridium, palladium, and platinum.

Are you up for a challenge?

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challengeMany of the citizen science projects covered on this site are designed to allow anyone to participate. This week, I have one that is designed to pique the interest of those of you in IT: the computer scientists, the developers, and the people who like to think in terms of big data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

In the Climate Resilience Data Challenge, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) want to know how you want to access the boat-loads of data they have available. They are offering cash prizes in this challenge.

“We need tools that utilize big data to help our local communities improve climate resilience, save our ecosystems, and prepare for climate change,” say challenge organizers. “We have climate data that is free and accessible, but much of it is not available through web services.”

In this “ideation” phase, the agencies involved want to know what data infrastructure you need and how you would use it infrastructure to create services and apps. What would you do if you didn’t need to download code or data? Which data sources would you use?

“With growing climate risk, it is evermore necessary to grow innovative capacity for resilience and adaptation. Using open climate data, imagine the possibilities of new applications that could fuel climate resilience efforts for communities and ecosystems as well as empower people to make smart decisions for the future. NASA and USGS invite you to take a step toward resilience by imagining solutions to our planet’s complex climate risks.”

Registration opens on Monday, December 15th. You can learn more about the individual parts of the challenge by clicking the links at the bottom of the Challenge page. Meanwhile, take a moment to check out some of the other open innovation challenges at the TopCoder site.

Debris disks – needles in the haystack?

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Finding extrasolar planets (planets not in our solar system) is hard — it’s a big universe, after all. However, if you concentrate your efforts on finding “debris disks” (clouds of dust, gas, and rocks) around stars, you might have better luck finding planets. This is because planets form from these disks (also called “YSO disks”).

The NASA WISE (wide-field infrared survey explorer) mission almost certainly has images of debris and YSO disks in its image set, but until now, we haven’t had the resources to start looking through them all. Disk Detective, the latest project out of the Zooniverse group, wants you to start sifting and classifying the WISE images.

Using the Disk Detective interface, you will find new debris disk stars by looking at flipbooks of images of the star. You’ll be looking for objects that don’t move around or break apart from one image to the next, and that are round and clearly defined. You’ll place a circle marker around the things you think are disks.

Why not just have a computer analyze all of this material? Computers still aren’t good at image recognition and usually confuse debris disks around stars with other astronomical objects like galaxies and nebulae.

Disk Detective represents NASA’s first foray into citizen science (in terms of crowdsourcing help; of course, it’s always done public outreach and encouraged public participation) and this is it’s first partnership with Zooniverse.

Image by MasterTux from Pixabay