Jennifer Grier, a Senior Scientist and Senior Education and Communication Specialist at Planetary Science Institute (PSI) and CosmoQuest’s lead support scientist. But the data set needs the many eyes and minds of citizen scientists to reach its full potential as a publicly available, searchable catalog,” said Dr. “This is a unique, powerful, and beautiful image data set that has already yielded excellent research science. The team says that Image Detective spreads the significant work necessary to label all of the images out to citizen scientists across the world.

The trick is, we need to make these images searchable, and that means taking the time to sort through, analyze, and label (add metadata) the unidentified images within the database of 1.5 million plus photos.” “From erupting volcanoes, to seasonal flooding, these images document the gradual changes that happen to our landscape. Pamela Gay, who is the Director of Technology and Citizen Science at ASP. “The astronauts’ photos of Earth are visually stunning, but more than that, they can be used to study our changing Earth,” said our good friend Dr. Public Invited to Test New Tool to Study Earth using Photos Taken by International Space Station Astronauts /JslJU6DIxo

I found that last part to be the most difficult, but I’ve been known to have trouble reading a map … so I’m hoping that I can improve a bit with more practice. Citizen scientists are asked to help identify geographic features (natural or human-made) and then determine the location on Earth where the photo is centered. Plus I’m a big fan of CosmoQuest and their ‘quest’ to bring science to the public.īut still, the setup CosmoQuest has is really great and the process is easy. And I also love the concept of regular, everyday people doing science. Now, I absolutely love seeing the images taken of Earth from the ISS, and I routinely follow all the astronauts on board on social media so I can see their latest images. I’ve tried it out, and wow, THIS is a lot of fun!

Calling all citizen scientists, geography buffs, fans of the International Space Station and those who love that orbital perspective!ĬosmoQuest has a brand new project in coordination with NASA and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) where you can help identify features in photographs taken by astronauts from the space station.

Skype a scientist sarah mcanulty