Zooniverse
Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal that has grown from the original Galaxy Zoo project. Unlike many early internet-based citizen science projects such as SETI@home which used spare computer processing power to analyse data, known as volunteer computing, Zooniverse projects require the active participation of human volunteers to complete research tasks. It allows users to participate in scientific research such as classifying galaxies. As of 11 July 2011 the community consists of 439,868 volunteers,[1] collectively referred to as "Zooites".[2]
Active projects currently include:
- Galaxy Zoo Hubble - Involves classifying hundreds of thousands of galaxies drawn from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope archive. It includes galaxies with 'blue clumps' that may represent a stage in the maturing of galaxies into modern forms.
- Galaxy Zoo Mergers
- Galaxy Zoo Supernovae
- Moon Zoo
- Old Weather
- Solar Stormwatch
- Planet Hunters - Identifying extrasolar planets from the light curves of stars recorded by the Kepler space telescope.
- The Milky Way Project
- Ice Hunters - Identifying Kuiper Belt objects for potential future targets for the New Horizons spacecraft. Also identifies variable stars and asteroids. It makes use of human review of subtracted images from various telescopes.
References
- ^ "Zooniverse". Retrieved 11 July 2011.
- ^ "Citizen Scientists Making Incredible Discoveries". NASA. Retrieved 11 July 2011.