Have you always wanted to find your own celestial body? Now's your chance: NASA Goddard announced today that it is sponsoring a new project and website, Disk Detective, which allows people to discover "embryonic planetary systems" hidden in the data generated by NASA's Wide-field infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. It's a data mining and analysis effort that anyone can get behind.Developed alongside Zooniverse, a network of scientists, software developers, and educators, Disk Detective is as a crowdsourcing project that will make the sifting through astronomical data a bit easier. From 2010 to 2011 WISE, which is locked in Earth orbit, scanned the entire sky in infrared, measuring some 745 million objects in detail. Working on this data, NASA is in the process of looking for planets that form and grow in "dust-rich circumstellar disks," which shine brightly in infrared wavelengths.However, other objects such as galaxies, interstellar dust clouds, and asteroids also glow in infrared. This infrared noise makes it difficult to identify planet-forming environments, which are of two kinds: Young Stellar Object disks (gaseous and less than 5 million years old), and debris disks, which are 5 million years or older and contain little to no gas. The former are found in or near young star clusters, while the latter contains "belts of rocky or icy debris that resemble the asteroid and Kuiper belts" found in our solar system.To work around this, Disk Detective takes images from WISE and other sky surveys (the James Webb Telescope will contribute data in the future), and animates them. These animated "flip books" can then be perused by volunteers, who work to classify objects according to shape and the number of objects present. Working on this cataloged image analysis, astronomers decide which objects deserve greater attention.This isn't NASA's first crowd-sourcing effort. In December of last year, NASA teamed with Planetary Resources, Inc. to launch a crowd-sourced asteroid hunting competition. NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) is also known for its "crowdsourcing journey," through which they launched a challenge to create a non-invasive method or technology to measure the absolute intracranial pressure in space.But, Disk Detective seems like an open-source project of a different and even more ambitious order. Finding asteroids hurtling toward Earth is one thing, but finding planet incubators in far off realms is quite another. As NASA admits, astronomers have used computers to search for needles in a haystack of data; but, they need human eyes, potentially millions of them, to find areas of prime interest. It's a novel solution to the sheer logistics of cataloging the incredible amount of data generated by WISE and other surveys. NASA and Zooniverse only have so many folks able to do this work at any given time, so it makes sense to enlist the help of the untold numbers who would love to contribute to the effort.Along with NASA's other crowd-sourcing projects, Disk Detective's methodology could light the way for future interstellar initiatives. With NASA's ever-shrinking budget, brought about by a congressional de-emphasis on space research, we could end up seeing a lot more of crowd-sourced astronomical research in the future. A possibility that would excite Carl Sagan if he were here to see it.
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