Welcome to the age of Citizen Science. Citizen Science is a form of crowdsourcing in which the public at large is asked to participate in the effort to make scientific discoveries. One major advocate of the Citizen Science approach to scientific research is NASA.

Last month they announced they want your help in finding fledgling planetary systems. In an effort to facilitate public participation in NASA’s WISE program, the space agency has deployed Disk Detective.

From 2010 through 2011, the WISE program, or Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, scanned the entire sky . . . twice. WISE ended in 2011, but was restarted in 2013 as NEOWISE, near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer.

The mission was to scan the sky at infrared wavelengths in search of embryonic planetary systems, or the early stages of planetary systems which are usually comprised of young stars that have disks of dust, ice, and gas circling them. As a result, WISE returned more than 745 million possible hits.

However, every infrared flicker cannot be considered an embryonic planetary system because galaxies, interstellar dust clouds, and asteroids glow infrared as well. With so many possible matches, NASA does not have the bandwidth to process all of this data. This is where you and the crowdsourcing model come in.









Asking the Public to Help

To help search through the volumes of data that WISE collected, NASA is turning to the public for help with the implementation of Disk Detective. James Garvin, the chief scientist for NASA Goddard’s Sciences and Exploration Directorate, stated:

“Through Disk Detective, volunteers will help the astronomical community discover new planetary nurseries that will become future targets for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.”

Even though this sounds to be a very complex endeavor, Disk Detective makes the research not only simple, but fun.

Before even signing up to the site, Disk Detective provides a sample flipbook, images of the star taken with different telescopes, to review to see if it is something that volunteers would do.

The entire process takes less than a minute. Basically, you review the flipbook of images which is less than 30 seconds. Then, based on what you have seen, select an option that best describes what appeared in the images. Once a selection is made, click “Finish” and Disk Detective queues up the next flipbook.