Open Innovation Space Quest

February 17, 2017 By IdeaConnection

You are probably never going to set foot in space, but that doesn’t mean you cannot explore worlds beyond our own. And you can do so with NASA’s latest open innovation project – Backyard Worlds: Planet 9.

This fascinating endeavor is calling on citizens around the world to help scientists search the outer fringes of our Solar System to identify brown dwarfs, low-mass stars and perhaps even the hypothesized ninth planet.

As far as scientists know, there are eight planets orbiting our Sun, but there could be more waiting to be discovered.  This is where you can come in. To hunt for celestial objects participants will be presented with short videos, consisting of infrared images captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope.  If they notice something of interest, they can mark its location.  If there is nothing there, they move onto the next four-frame clip.

“It’s hard to believe, but our solar neighborhood is still unexplored territory,” commented Jackie Faherty, a senior scientist in the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) Department of Astrophysics. “There are cold worlds hiding just a short distance from the Sun, and Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a platform for bringing citizen scientists into the search party.”

People are Better than Algorithms

Although imaging processing software can do the job, the team behind the project say that humans are much better at spotting genuine objects of interest in the busy images. And there are far too many of them for the scientists to handle on their own!

For more information, and to sign up to the open innovation quest, click here.


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Reader Comments


To simplify your search , use an
Atomic Absorbtion Radio Spectrometer .
This coupled with OVER AMPLIFICATION, can scan at a greater rate than set co-ordanances.
Once detected can use a spiralling alogritham that can confirm size,shape and distance.
This will also provide information past any accepted concept of what is real against what is written,Then logged.

Post script .At a greater distance away ,out of orbit Second reassesment at a distance angle should provide 2D to produce 3D computer image.
Regards Stephen Fitton Esq.
Posted by Stephen on February 27, 2017

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