Author name: Matthew T. Dearing

The extreme popularity and continuing scientific success of Galaxy Zoo and the subsequent explosion of the many Zooniverse projects have brought useful and important scientific research to the masses of interested citizens from around the world. Dynamic Patterns Research continues to support these awesome efforts, and is currently actively involved in the Planet Hunters program. Zooniverse has been adding new projects at an impressive rate–there are ten live projects now–and they apparently have no plans to slow down. In fact, they are now looking outward to the very group of people who processes their masses of data to brainstorm the next big citizen science project to be developed.

Hosted through the Citizen Science Alliance and with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Adler Planetarium, Zooniverse has announced an open call for proposals for future scientific projects that would benefit from the collective, analytical efforts of hundreds of thousands of remote volunteers. The proposals would need to have a direct connection with a scientific or research group, but the ideas should also be able to flow from citizen scientists themselves.

The next selection round of ideas will occur in January 2012, so plan on completing your submission in December 2011. If you are not familiar with the great Zooniverse projects, take some time to directly experience how powerful they are and the potential that the platform can have for so many other serious scientific questions that can only be successfully answered with the critical help from citizen scientists around the world.

Begin Your Submission

It’s a great thing to be able to do real science on your own, and this is exactly what we encourage here at Dynamic Patterns Research. But, it’s even another great thing to be able to help inspire the desire to do real science in someone else. This is where a great new partnership between NASA, Teachers in Space, and MAKE Magazine is focused to bring exciting scientific experience to young minds.

The goal of the new “NASA Make: Challenge” is to solicit the ingenuity of makers and amateurs to develop inexpensive kits that can be built by students and then sent off into suborbital flights to perform some scientific experiment.

The deadline for submission of ideas is fast approaching on April 30, 2011 and the rules and guidelines are posted online.

This program is planned to be a multi-year event, but the first winning kit designs will be initially assembled by teachers at a workshop at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center’s AERO Institute in Palmdale, CA in early August 2011. These kits will then fly aboard the Excelsior STEM mission, which is an unmanned suborbital flight scheduled to fly aboard a Masten Space Systems reusable launch vehicle later in 2011.

NASA Make: Challenge Webcast from MAKE magazine on Vimeo.

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This wonderful partnership is a great example of NASA’s new approach to finding success in the socially-connected and cash-strapped early 21st Century. As it becomes clear and ever more important that NASA must continue to evolve as a collaborative partner in space exploration and cutting-edge research (read the 2011 NASA 2011 Strategic Plan), they are also increasing their emphasis on partnerships with a broader base of academic institutions as well as directly approaching the exploding citizen science community. In particular, NASA’s new Open Government Initiative, just released last year and is now under development even though “openness” was part of their original 1958 founding legislation, is creating an updated culture of connection between their scientists and engineers and the rest of the country’s citizenry.

This renewed energy from NASA should be a boon to those citizen scientists interested in finding more direct ways to collaborate with the exciting scientific resources and research fields that NASA is mandated to tackle. Although created by an academic middle-man from the UK, Chris Lintott, the exploding Zooniverse of citizen science projects is the greatest example right now of the successful connection between NASA-generated data (through the Hubble Space Telescope, the Kepler Mission, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the STEREO Space Observatories) and the important scientific analysis performed by volunteers from around the world. NASA is proud of these endeavorers, and readily brags about the progress (“Citizen Scientists Making Incredible Discoveries“, NASA Science News, April 22, 2011).

NASA wants to provide critical tools for citizen scientists. It is not only an aspect of their mandate to be an open source scientific resource, but the valuable role that citizen scientists now play in the advancement of science is becoming more clear each and every day. NASA wants to be successful, and they know that they must collaborate with the private sector and the private citizenry to help become what they want to be, especially since the US Congress struggles every year to fund this much needed success.

As a seasoned citizen scientist, or if you are wanting to simply whet your appetite for scientific adventures and informal self-learning, the time is ripe now to connect with NASA and take a direct part in the rapid development of new technologies and exciting scientific discoveries that are happening right now and will happen in the near future.

Please let us know at Dynamic Patterns Research what sort of connections you have made or are in the process of developing so that we might learn more about the great new opportunities that could be out there for other citizen scientists.