Heads Up, Citizen Scientists: The Moon Needs You!

May 24, 2010 1:01 AM

Moon Zoo is another project from Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott, the creator of Galaxy Zoo (previously: 1, 2, 3). Moon Zoo calls for citizen scientists to record the craters and boulders, among other things, on the Moon's surface.

The images are being sent back from NASA's Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter faster than scientists can go through them. A four and a half minute tutorial will get you started.

posted by kro (7 comments total)

I'm afraid to try, because when we did this with Mars I could never get the tool to work properly.

All I want is to be a space explorer! *cries*
posted by hermitosis at 6:56 AM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

This one is a lot easier! I was so frustrated with the Mars one but I had better luck with Galaxy Zoo and this is a lot like Galaxy Zoo. The only thing that's frustrating is the "interesting" flags for scientists...you're never given an example of what any of them look like, other than a fresh crater and boulder tracks, so if you don't have much Moon knowledge you can't really point those out.
posted by kro at 7:18 AM on May 24, 2010

"The only thing that's frustrating is the "interesting" flags for scientists...you're never given an example of what any of them look like"
The thing is, a lot of stuff that's interesting to a scientist is stuff they've never seen before, so they can't really give you any examples ;-)

As an aside, I believe there's a mefite involved in the UI design for the Moon Zoo?
posted by edd at 7:29 AM on May 24, 2010

John Gill would like you to grade the boulders. Climbers down here are RUNNING OUT OF GNAR!
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:14 AM on May 24, 2010

As an aside, I believe there's a mefite involved in the UI design for the Moon Zoo?

That would be me! I built the Moon Zoo and Boulder Wars interfaces (though their web designer produced the final button graphics). Hopefully they're easy to use, I tried to make them as painless and unobtrusive as possible.

There are actually keyboard shortcuts for several actions that haven't been detailed on the official site yet, but I think the help pages will be updated soon. For example, you can undo and redo with the usual key combinations, nudge annotations around with the cursor keys (+shift for 10 pixel nudges), and toggle the Crater and Area tools with C and A.

There really is an insane amount of data coming from the LRO, something like hundreds of gigabytes per day. So much so that I believe many of the images you'll see on Moon Zoo have probably never been looked at by a human before.


kro - Towards the bottom of this page there are some examples of different features (though from the forums I think there's some confusion about the crater chains, so those images might change).
posted by lucidium at 4:01 PM on May 24, 2010 [3 favorites]

I assume no MIB will come to the door if I spot something like a '26 Model X Duesenberg on the Moon ... I just don't care to be part of any endless speculation sessions.

I thought the Galaxy Zoo interface was awful. That said, I think I'll give this one a try, because it was cool a few weeks back when the long-missing Lunakhod rover turned up... with a *still-working* laser reflector of all things.

posted by Twang at 7:51 PM on May 24, 2010

Hole in One!
posted by homunculus at 9:00 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]