Gamers discover new planets

admin · Sep 29, 2011

Well, recently we already had gamers cracking the puzzle of the AIDS enzymes that had been boggling scientists for a while, but yesterday, gamers also managed to assist space boffins to discover some new planets.

Players of browser-based star stalking game Planet Hunters may have helped scientists to identify two new exoplanets.

The Kepler Space Telescope is a busy piece of space-machinery. Tasked with finding habitable planets outwith our solar system, it spends its time monitoring 200,000 stars and taking photos of them every thirty seconds. To help scientists deal with the massive amounts of data that Kepler sends home, researchers from several universities teamed up to build Planet Hunters, a browser-based game which tasks you with finding evidence of exoplanets in Kepler's data. Now, after their first month of searching, the game's users have found their first two possible exoplanets.

The Kepler mission creates its data by compiling the light fluctuations of a particular star over a 30 day period. If that light signal dips at any point, it could mean that a planet is passing between Kepler and the star; this is known as a transit pattern. Planet Hunters, seen in the accompanying screenshot, asks you to look through light data from several stars and decide whether or not you can see any transit patterns. If you think you see a transit, simply pull a small box over the time when the dip occurred and send your discovery off to the Kepler team. It can be a little difficult to tell what exactly you're meant to be looking for at first, but the site is littered with tutorials and guides to help you on your search.

The Kepler team announced the discovery in this research paper, noting how pleased they were that regular users were able to accurately identify transit patterns. Earlier this month it was revealed that PC gamers helped to crack an AIDS-related protein problem which had eluded scientists for 15 years; now, they've helped to uncover two new exoplanets in deep space. Right now, the future of "citizen science" looks like a bright one.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/113377-Gamers-Help-Scientists-Discover-New-Planets

I came across this article in Dutch yesterday, and when I looked for it this morning I did find yet another article about Kepler. Apparently the program is suffering cutbacks. Being someone who thinks all this space stuff is mighty exciting, I'm adding a link to that article as well as a request that if you do care about stuff like this, and you are in the US, you appeal to your politicians to not scrap this amazing piece of kit.

NASA's Planet Hunter Needs Money to Keep Searching for Earth's Twins

NASA needs to extend the lifespan of a very special spacecraft: Kepler, the agency's designated planet-hunter. Kepler is the only mission that can answer an existential scientific question that humans have: how common are other Earths?

Other earths - rocky planets with liquid water and a decent atmosphere - would have the raw materials for life as we know it. Kepler can tell us how many of these earth-like planets there are, bringing us one huge step to answering one of the most profound questions in science: are we alone? If we are, that'll be one stunning answer. If we aren't, that'll be a different kind of stunning answer.

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Right now, the drive to find life elsewhere in the universe is in trouble. Two other important exoplanet proposals - The Terrestrial Planet Finder and the Space Interferometer Mission - have been put on permanent hold. The delayed James Webb Space Telescope is eating up more and more of NASA's science budget. And the general budgetary situation in Washington is bleak.

Kepler keeps chugging along towards the end of its initial 3.5 year lifespan. But it needs a little more time to complete the work it was sent up to do. Normally, those funds would be easy to come up with, but given the belt tightening in Washington, Bill Borucki, the missio's longtime leader and promoter, is getting genuinely nervous. "There is a serious worry that Kepler's funding might not be extended," Borucki told me. That is to say, we might give up on the quest to find out how common Earths are in the universe for want of $20 million per year. For perspective, that's the cost of fighting a few hours of the war in Afghanistan. Feel free to fill in your preferred partisan budgetary comparison. Any way you slice it, $20 million is nothing in the scheme of the Federal budget.

If we care about finding out if we're alone in the universe - and we do - NASA and Congress have got to come together to find $20 million for this small mission. As University of California exoplanet scientist Greg Laughlin put it, "I do think that extending Kepler's mission would be just about the very best way that NASA could spend money in these belt-tightening times."

Full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...ey-to-keep-searching-for-earths-twins/245712/

Lykke - Cyrene · Sep 29, 2011

oh wow - that's so cool!!!

AlphaGeek · Sep 29, 2011

There's also another project getting under way that involves some home based participation with the goal of locating the ascent stage of Snoopy, Apollo 10's lunar module. Apollo 10 was the "dress rehersal" for the first manned lunar landing. After a powered approach to under 50k feet of the surface, the descent stage was jettisoned and the ascent module returned to a higher orbit and docked with the command module. The 2 astronauts aboard Snoopy transferred back to the Command Module (appropriately named Charlie Brown), and then the ascent module was cast off into the viod.

Unlike all the other Apollo missions that landed on the moon, Snoopy's ascent stage didn't impact on the lunar surface. Instead, it went into a solar orbit. A group of amatuer astronomers are taking up the hunt for the last flying Apollo spacecraft.

http://news.discovery.com/space/apollo-10-search-snoopy-astronomy-110919.html