How can you just sit there, reading this blog post and sipping on your coffee/tea/kombucha/pinot noir/Liquid Death when NASA needs your help with 36 different research projects? And not just pretend missions, designed to get you excited about space or teach you something. These are actual research missions to search for extraterrestrial life inhabiting distant stars, discover near-Earth asteroids, and conduct environmental monitoring right here on Earth.
This is your chance to work directly with NASA scientists on cutting edge research which I’m guessing– since you’re reading this blog– is probably exactly the sort of opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Here are just a couple of the projects that need your help, right now.
If you see a strange, aurora-like trail of purple light that appears high in the sky, sometimes with green fingers poking downward, and you haven’t been experimenting with hallucinogens, you have discovered Steve.
Originally named after a mysterious shrubbery in the animated movie Over the Hedge, and then painstakingly wrestled into the backronym STEVE, for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, Steve/STEVE is a high atmosphere phenomenon caused by fast-moving ionized gas high in Earth’s atmosphere, at the edge of space, unleashed by solar storms.
STEVE sightings are associated with unpredictable solar phenomena interacting with poorly understood magnetic burblings deep within our planet, and can trigger unexpected communications signal blackouts, which makes STEVE exactly the sort of mystery that drives NASA folks crazy. And since NASA scientists can’t be everywhere (which is just as well; that would be excessive and weird), they need volunteers to watch for STEVE, photograph it, take notes and share the information with them.
The project is called Aurorasaurus, and at the annual Citizen Science Association conference in Arizona, project lead Liz MacDonald said NASA relies on contributions from volunteers to help them study rare phenomena like STEVEs.
“We actually do not know nearly enough; we don’t have nearly enough satellites,” MacDonald explains. “Space is way too huge. We don’t have a real time view of the aurora all the time.”
You can learn more about Aurorasaurus and sign up to help here.
You probably already know that there will be a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024 (because, as we’ve already established, you’re reading a citizen science blog), and also know that it will be visible along a diagonal path from Durango, Mexico, Dallas, TX, Hot Springs, AR, Bloomington, IN, Cleveland, OH, Buffalo, NY, Burlington, VT and up through Toronto, Canada and onward.
But what you may not know is that the Citizen CATE (Continental America Telescopic Eclipse) project is recruiting teams of volunteers who live along the path to collect detailed information on the event. Selected teams will receive telescopes, cameras and other gear needed to record data, as well as instructions from NASA scientists.
Interested? Then sign onto Citizen CATE at SciStarter and get the latest news on the project.
What if you could be the first human to discover intelligent life on another world? Every textbook about human history forevermore would include the sentence “Humans had no direct evidence of life in the cosmos until Hildegarde Farfellmueller, a dental hygienist from Toledo, OH discovered a radio signal that could have originated only from an intelligent civilization.”
(Though, obviously, if you’re not Hildegarde and not from Toledo, just substitute your own information into the sentence.)
This could really happen, but only if you join the Are We Alone in the Universe? project. As a human, which I trust you are, you have image processing skills that surpass even the most heavily hyped AI program (so far). In this project, you will run your human eyeballs over graphic representations of radio signals from deep space to see if any of them are big hellos from other civilizations.
You can hear more about these projects from the scientists themselves at the podcast Citizen Science: Stories of Science We Can Do Together, Season 4, Episode 5:
Help NASA With Space- and Earth-Based Research!
Podcast transcript
Bob Hirshon
Welcome to Citizen Science: Stories of Science We Can Do Together, brought to you by SciStarter. In this episode, we’ll hear from NASA researchers we caught up with at the recent Citizen Science Association Annual Conference known as C*Sci, in scenic and extremely toasty Tempe, Arizona.
Bob
A couple of weeks ago, Tempe, Arizona was the absolute hotbed of citizen science activity. And when I say hot bed, I mean hot bed because it was like 100 degrees every day there. But it’s also true figuratively, because hundreds of citizen science project leaders from universities and federal laboratories, libraries and various nonprofit groups all gathered for the national Citizen Science Association Conference, now dubbed C*Sci. So capital C, asterisk, Sci, S-C-I. Which is really clever, because the C can stand for citizen science. But if you don’t like that term, you can make the C stand for whatever you like better: community science, or, I don’t know, collaborative science– I think I just made that one up. But who knows? Anyway, it all amounts to regular non scientists helping professional scientists with their research. And when you think about that, maybe groups like Audubon with their bird counts, or Journey North with their monarch butterfly and hummingbird migration tracking, or the National Weather Service with their weather watcher networks, those sorts of things come to mind. And you might be surprised to hear that one of the biggest players in citizen science is NASA. NASA currently has 36 active citizen science projects, where you can help their scientists study everything from exoplanets orbiting distant stars, to potential mosquito outbreaks here on Earth. I spoke with NASA’s head of citizen science programs Marc Kuchner. So Mark, what can you tell us about this program?
Marc Kuchner
NASA citizen science program is where scientists work with volunteers from around the world and accomplish science that requires help from from the the passion, the intellect, of of our volunteers.
Bob
And you guys already have the top scientists in the world. So what can regular people contribute that they can use that could be helpful?
Marc
Our scientists are awesome, aren’t they? Our volunteers are even more awesome, because they think of things that our scientists overlook. You know, sometimes the great “aha” moments in science are when a scientist starts down one path, and then all of a sudden realizes that oh, wait, there was another discovery lying just over there. And, you know, real human brains, real curious humans will naturally go gravitate to the new, in the new direction, right? And, and so having having volunteers bring that curiosity makes science go.
Bob
And what sorts of projects can we help out, help out with?
Marc
Yeah, so that’s only just the start of it. Our projects benefit from people who are in locations that are special. So for example, it can be challenging to send like 1000s of NASA scientists to remote parts of the globe to study penguins, or to study the aurora. But people who were there can pick up their camera and go outside and take the right picture at the right time, and make a huge difference.
Bob
Wow. So how can people get involved? I know you already have, I guess, millions of folks that are, that are doing this? There are people watching this video, what do they do to join one of these?
Marc
Science.nasa.gov/citizenscience lists all of our 36 active projects, and just pick your favorite science topic and start clicking buttons and see where it goes.
Bob
Great. Alright, thanks so much, Mark.
Marc
My pleasure.
Bob
Now nothing gets Marc and other NASA scientists more excited than space events that are visible and compelling to people here on Earth. And high on that list is solar eclipses and auroras. They’re events, they’re beautiful, they’re dramatic, and most of all, they’re visible to people without the need for telescopes or other special gear. And that’s why NASA folks are like hyperventilating about the coming year, which they’re calling the Heliophysics Big Year. Helio meaning “sun,” physics meaning the study of physical phenomena, big being “big” and year– okay, you got the idea. This is going to be a big year for solar science. We’ve got an annular eclipse, known as the Ring of Fire eclipse, that’s happening on October 14 of this year. That is a solar eclipse that happens when the moon is sort of at its most distant point in its orbit from Earth. So it doesn’t completely cover the sun, it leaves a ring, a circle of the corona visible as like a bright ring, hence the name. And it looks really cool. And then there’s the total solar eclipse where the moon is close enough to Earth that the disk completely blocks the sun. And that solar eclipse is sort of traversing the middle of the United States on April 8 of 2024. And not only that, but we’re also coming up on what’s known as the solar maximum portion of the sun’s 11 year solar cycle. And that means crazy cool auroras in both the northern and the southern hemisphere. So both the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis. So NASA scientists right now have an especially “sunny” disposition. Oh, boy. Okay. Anyway, that includes Amir Caspi, who is principal scientist on the Citizen CATE project. That stands for the Citizen Continental America Telescope Eclipse experiment. He’s trying to sign up 34 teams of amateur astronomers who live along the April eclipse’s path of totality. Thanks for being with us, Amir.
Amir Caspi
Thanks for having me.
Bob
And what can you tell us about CATE?
Amir
So Citizen CATE 2024 is a scientific project to understand the sun’s outermost atmosphere, the solar corona, during the total solar eclipse that crosses the United States on April 8, 2024. Solar eclipses are actually an amazing way to understand the solar corona. You can’t see it during the day normally, because the sun is just so bright, right? But during a total eclipse, the Moon crosses in front of the sun, and it blocks out the really bright disk. And that lets you see the solar corona, which is only about as bright as a full moon. And during a total eclipse, you can see it in resolution and quality that you just can’t match any other time. So it’s a perfect opportunity to study the corona.
Bob
Wow. And so who are the volunteers that are going to be helping you with this? How do you select them? What are they going to be doing?
Amir
Yeah, well, we’re still working on our recruitment strategy. But the plan is to have 35 teams of about three or four people each, in communities all along the eclipse path, starting in Texas, going through the Midwest, all the way up into Maine. Okay, we’re gonna have about 35 teams, 35 teams total. And they’re, each team is going to be separated by about 50 miles or so. So that they span the eclipse path. And as the shadow progresses across the United States, it crosses each team sequentially, okay? And so we’re going to give equipment, each team we’re going to give them cameras, telescopes, tripods, computers, and we’re going to give them training, so that they can take observations of the solar corona uniformly exactly the same as every other team. The reason we want to do that, if you’re standing, it’s just one location, the eclipse is only going to last a few minutes, the shadow will pass over you, and you’ll get a few minutes. It’s an amazing experience, by the way, but we want to study the corona, we need more than just a few minutes of observations. So if we can take advantage of the fact that the eclipse spends 60 minutes over the United States, then we can get a time lapse movie, basically, of the corona. And so if we have stations all along the eclipse path, and they’re all taking data with the same equipment in the same way, we can then splice all of that data together and get 60 minutes of totality.
Bob
Wow. So I know this is for a lay audience. But I just wonder if you could explain, you know, what, what sort of data you get and what you do with it.
Amir
Right, so the cameras that we’re going to be using are just regular cameras. But they are special because they’re sensitive to polarized light. So if you have polarized sunglasses, for example, you know that they cut out light reflections in a certain way. And that’s because light is a wave. And it can be polarized. In other words, a wave can do this, or it can do this. And you can actually tell which way the wave is waving by using special filters. So this camera has special filters that tell us what the polarization of light is. And everybody will be using those special cameras. The reason that we want to make these measurements is because the solar corona turns out is really really hot. The surface of the sun, it’s only a few thousand degrees, but the corona is a few million degrees. Yeah, it’s really weird. It’s like if you’re standing next to a campfire and you walk further away, it gets hotter and hotter and hotter. And that’s, that’s not something that we’re used to. So we’re trying to understand why the corona is so hot and the corona also has a lot of magnetic field all through it. So, you know, everyone’s hopefully familiar with bar magnets, fridge magnets, right. And in school, you probably did this experiment where you put a piece of paper over a magnet and you spread iron filings. And you notice that it makes specific shapes and traces out the magnetic field, right. So in the sun, there’s hot plasma gas that’s had its electrons stripped off of it. And it traces out the shape of the magnetic fields in the sun, and allows us to see what that looks like. That magnetic field is super duper complicated, and it changes over time. And sometimes it can actually, it can actually snap and cause solar flares, we’re still trying to understand all of those processes. During a total solar eclipse when we can see the corona so clearly, that’s the best time to study the sun’s magnetic field, to study the plasma that’s in the sun’s outermost atmosphere, how it changes, how it evolves, what powers it. And also the sun puts out a constant stream of particles called the solar wind, too: basically it’s shooting off electrons and atoms all into space. Those those hit Earth sometimes, they cause the aurora. And we’re still trying to understand why those particles come off of the sun and how. Again, during the total solar eclipse, we’ll be able to see processes that help us better understand that.
Bob
Oh, that’s so cool. I mean, normally, you want to turn the light on and shine, you know, to learn more. In this case, when it goes dark, you can actually have this glimpse of things you can’t normally see.
Amir
Yeah, that’s right, because we’re trying to see something really dim. And so you have to turn off the really bright thing.
Bob
Oh, that is so cool. So what’s that date again?
Amir
That’s April 8, 2024. And it crosses from, in the United States it crosses from Southwest Texas around San Antonio, all the way through southern Illinois, Indiana and up into Niagara Falls, Rochester, Buffalo, and then out through Maine.
Bob
Cool. All right. Well, thanks so much, Amir. That sounds awesome.
Amir
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Bob
Also part of the Heliophysics Big Year are studies about the aurora, which occur in both the northern and southern hemisphere. Liz MacDonald heads up a citizen science project called Aurorasaurus, for no particular reason, where people share images and reports of the Aurora Borealis in the north and the Aurora Australis in the south. So Liz, tell us about Aurorasaurus.
Liz
Yeah, so we work with people who photograph the aurora and tell us about it. And we can build better alerts for when you can see aurora. And we’ve made discoveries about unusual kinds of aurora called “Steve.”
Bob
Steve? Okay, so let’s back up for a second: Aurorasaurus? Is that just a cute name? Or is there something prehistoric about it?
Liz
It is just a cute name, but memorable, hopefully. And, you know, that’s, we came up with the name back when we started in 2014. Before that, it was really hard to come up with a name, but I’m really glad that we all liked this one.
Bob
Right. Okay. But Steve, is that just because it was discovered by Steve or it’s, are you like, you have a friend named Steve?
Liz
Yeah, good question. So there’s actually a movie called Over the Hedge, okay. And in that movie, there’s animated characters. And there’s a little squirrel, voiced by Steve Carell. And there’s a hedge that appears in their neighborhood. And they’re afraid of it. And so he says, “let’s just call it Steve, because we don’t know what it is.” And so people were noticing this weird, different kind of aurora, while they were watching aurora to the north, from Southern Cal, southern Canada, especially Alberta. And there was this thing overhead that was mauve colored and looked like a contrail, other than it being mauve with some green fingers waving around it. And it was, we needed a name. So they said, “Let’s just call it Steve.” And that name stuck.
Bob
Wow. So now, for the people who contribute, what do you do with their data? How is it useful in the study of, I guess, the aurora, the magnetosphere and all that to get information back from regular people?
Liz
Yeah, so we actually do not know nearly enough; we don’t have nearly enough satellites. Space is way too huge. We don’t have a real time view of the aurora all the time. And then the aurora can be very dynamic. So it can come and be visible even here in Arizona, but for a very brief amount of time, and very rarely. And so now using smartphones, we can report if you’ve seen it and let others know around you. And that is… then we can all see this beautiful phenomenon, this example of space physics. And it’s really exciting to capture.
Bob
Wow. So are there, so is it possible that people will find new phenomena. So in addition to Steve, we’ll have, I don’t know, Carol and Rita and Fred?
Liz MacDonald
Alan is actually the new name for a possible thing being looked at right now from a group, another group of aurora chasers based in the southern hemisphere. So the Aurora Australis folks have seen something that we’re working on the name but there’s a joke about Steve and Alan, I don’t know. Um, but yeah, you could be the next one. And it would be fun, I think to–
Bob
Yeah, I want to name it “Bob.”
Liz
Yeah, well, okay, then you need to sign up and get cracking on looking for that unusual Aurora.
Bob
It’s a really dynamic kind of system. Do you know what mostly, if there is an answer to this, is generating the variation? Is it changes in the sun, changes in the upper atmosphere, magnetosphere, changes in the core of the earth? What, what spins off Steves and Alans and things like that?
Liz
Yeah, all of those things change all of the time. But the primary thing is that the Earth is in its protective magnetic bubble. And so the Earth’s you know, North Pole and South Pole are pretty constant. And so our bubble always has a fixed north and south pole. The sun’s magnetic field has a north and south pole that actually flip every 11 years. And that causes the solar cycle, which causes changes that drive more aurora during the maximum of that cycle. And then also, there’s out in space where the sun’s magnetic field that extends throughout the planets, and then where it interacts with the Earth’s bubble magnetosphere. It can change, it can be north or south or east or west or strongly blowing from the sun or not. So the Earth’s magnetic field environment is bathed in this constantly varying solar wind. And that drives the constantly varying Steves and Alans.
Bob
It really is like weather. You’ve got things popping up–
Liz
Space weather.
Bob
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Liz
It is called space weather.
Bob
Just as dynamic and just as ever-changing and interesting. Wow.
Liz
And it’s a 93-million-mile system that’s hard to model, because we’re looking at it from here. And the sun is a long way away. And a lot of things can happen along the way. Which is why it’s hard for us to give you, you know, we can see things happening on the sun. And we know it’ll take about three days to get here. But then until we have some satellites that are closer to Earth, a million miles away, which is about an hour at the speed those things travel, we can’t really tell you how strong it will be. Or you know what, exactly where the auroras will happen.
Bob
Wow. All right. Incredible. All right. Well, thanks so much, Liz.
Liz
Thank you, Bob.
Bob
All right. We’ll have lots more about the Heliophysics Big Year and many citizen science projects associated with it in the coming months. Now, NASA doesn’t shy away from big questions. And this next NASA citizen science project asks one of the biggest: Are We Alone in the Universe? UCLA doctoral scholar Megan Grace Li works on the project. So how are you finding out whether we are alone in the universe? And how can we help?
Megan Grace Li
That is a great question.
Bob
That is the question. Yes.
Megan
So every year we search the sky for radio signals, and we look for radio signals, because nothing else in space is really generating signals that look like this. The only known generators we have are pulsars, which are quite rare. And we can generally like figure out this is a pulsar, or other people on earth sending radio signals. So we have over 60 million candidate techno signatures that we found over the past like seven years, and our current computers can get rid of 99.5% of these candidates signals and say these are for sure from Earth.
Bob
Okay.
Megan
But that leaves .5 percent of the most interesting signals,
Bob
How many is that? I can’t…
Megan
300,000.
Bob
Oh, thank you. Okay.
Megan
So you could have your grad student, AKA, me, search through all 300,000 of these signals and try to tell you if they’re from Earth or not, or we could eventually train an AI to do that for us. So that is our goal with the citizen science project.
Bob
Oh, okay. So you’re, so it’s not just that we’re gonna get 1000s and 1000s of people to identify them. And that’s it. They’re training a computer to do it. So in the future, you could do even more of this.
Megan
Yeah, that’s exactly correct, because the search volume is already so much data, but we’ve only searched a bathtub’s worth of the Earth’s oceans, if you try to compare that to how much of the sky we’ve searched. So we really need like a lot of computing power and you know, hopefully eventually not as much manual labor from all of us. But yeah.
Bob
Well, what is the– so how do I, what’s the task that I do when I sign up?
Megan
So you’re handed a dynamic spectra, which is a fancy word for a frequency versus time graph.
Bob
That’s also fancy.
Megan
That’s so true…So we visualize our radio signals in terms of some kind of image. So normally, you maybe hear these things or the computer would read them, but we make them into pictures so you can visualize a radio signal, which is a little weird. So our radio signals sometimes look like diagonal lines. They can look like polka dots. They can be like weird plaid shapes. Some of them look like landing strips, caterpillar’s, so we just asked you to choose which image it looks most like. So we have some representative image of all the different classes. You know, there’s like a fat caterpillar, some straight lines and pinstripes and you just decide which image yours looks most like.
Bob
Oh, okay. And then so what is that, so caterpillar is something that some ham radio operator did, and a straight line is something that–
Megan
Exactly.
Bob Hirshon
Oh, okay, and then if it’s none of the above, it might me, MIGHT be–
Megan
Yeah.
Bob
Might be alien civilizations saying “Why aren’t you listening to me? We’ve been doing this for 1000 years!”
Megan
I know. Right? Dumb human. So our “none of the above” class is actually our third most populous class. There are 1000s and 1000s of none of the above. So these could be really rare radio transmitters. Maybe somebody, you know, one ham radio person versus the GPS created this thing that’s none of the above.
Bob
Okay. And then and then so are the none of the aboves further analyzed?
Megan
That’s correct. Yeah. So every single none of the above class eventually will be looked at by a member of our team, meaning either me or my advisor, Jean-Luc Margot.
Bob
Okay. All right. And then in some distant future, there’ll be a computer program that just gets it down to those– those 300,000 get down even tighter–
Megan
Exactly.
Bob
So you don’t have to look through quite as few, quite as many.
Megan
Yeah. So I guess my hope is that the next graduate student who takes on this project is looking at much fewer than 300,000. And then, you know, maybe someday it’s 10. And then it’s one and we found them.
Bob
Yay. All right. Great. Well, thanks so much for sharing us.
Megan
Thank you. Yeah.
Bob
Well, if any aliens are listening in to this podcast, why not hit us up at info at SciStarter.org? Let us know what you want to hear on the podcast and tell us why you waited so long to communicate with us. And that goes for earthlings too! We’d love to hear from you as well. Tell us what you think of the podcast what you’d like us to cover in future episodes. Ask us anything. All right. Well, in this episode, we’ve told you about just three of the 36 active NASA citizen science projects available, which is totally inadequate. Fortunately, I can announce that SciStarter has a new partnership with NASA to share much more about NASA citizen science. And it’s called Do NASA Science Live and consists of regular live seminars where you can hear about NASA citizen science programs from the project scientists themselves, live, interact directly with them, ask them questions, whatever you like. Now, the first Do NASA Science Live event is July 20. And we’re co-presenting that one with NSTA, the National Science Teachers Association. To learn more about that event and other NASA citizen science stuff, go to SciStarter.org/nasa.
Bob
Well, that’s all we have for you this episode. Happy Summer. I’m Bob Hirshon. See you next time. This podcast is brought to you each month by SciStarter, where you will find of citizen science projects, events and tools. It’s all at SciStarter.org, that’s S-C-I-S-T-A-R-T-E-R dot O-R-G. SciStarter’s founder is Darlene Cavalier. And thanks so much to you, the listener and citizen scientist for getting involved and making a difference. If you have any ideas you want to share with us, any things you want to hear on this podcast, you know how to get in touch with us info@scistarter.org Thanks.
