2009

Take two students from MIT; now, take two students from MIT with only $150 in their pockets and a notion to use a little science to make a little art, and what do you get? … Eight gigabytes of near-space photographs and an experience to share to the rest of the world of citizen scientists!

Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee, and Eric Newton set out to take some amazing pictures, and they didn’t have much cash to get the job done. So, with a lot of ingenuity, a little scrounging around the dorm room, they were able to create a secure — and legal — launch vehicle that contained a used Canon A470 camera and sent it up 17 1/2 miles to take some excellent images capturing the curvature of the Earth. With a lot of luck, and little help from an GPS-enabled pre-paid cell phone for tracking, they found their vehicle (a Styrofoam container with a couple of hand warmers inside!) only 20 miles away from the launch site.

The group plans to post a detailed instruction guide on how they accomplished the launch, and will be providing the information free of charge. We will be sure to link to the instructions from DPR, and maybe we’ll be seeing in the near future more balloons flying high from citizen scientists around the world.

Several days ago, we featured the NYC Cricket Crawl citizen science project sponsored by the Discover Live organization … and with a little rain delay from last night, tonight is now the night for event!

The exciting part for everyone not living in the greater New York City area (although, it certainly is a large area!), is that we can watch the results coming in live. So, check out all of the chirping action, and watch the latest in citizen science produce real results for real research!

Citizen Science activities certainly don’t have to cost a lot of money, and most of the projects we discuss here at DPR are essentially “free” to perform… but this project… now, this project does cost some money. But, it’s pretty darn awesome. And, following this line of extreme citizen science would be more tuned for a lager group or team who can contribute more financial assistance and expertise.

This is the ultimate model rocket launch, performed by the professional NASA astrophysicist by day and citizen scientist by night, Dr. Alex Antunes. Here, he is merging science with music with the plan to build an ionospheric detector with a device to convert the input signals to a MIDI stream that can be picked up by HAM radios. We’ll be able to “listen” to low-orbital space music for as long as the little satellite can survive.

Like I said… pretty, cool, right?

Follow the project on the blogs listed below, and wish the team great luck for a successful launch in 2010!

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in citizen science was certainly not on the minds of 6-year-old Alyson Yates and her mom, Kate, when they stepped out into their back yard one day to scout for ladybugs. But, their effort that day lead to a critical discovery that the Lost Ladybug Project from Cornell University had been long awaiting.

What the Yates found was the elusive nine-spotted ladybug, likely to have been overtaken in the United States by the Asian seven-spotted bugs imported in the 1970s and 80s to assist with crop pest control.

Now these little red fairytale creatures are living the high-life in Ithaca and breeding like wildfire. The hope is that the researchers will discover the true cause of the drastic decline of our classic native ladybug, and what might be a way to bring them back to our backyards.

Read more about this great success story of citizen science, and find our more about how you can participate in the Lost Ladybug Project…