With NASA’s manned space flight program in tumult, it’s an open question when/if human boots will tramp on Martian soil. But the space agency has provided a virtual way for humans to explore the red planet, with its new “Be a Martian” program.
The online project, a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft, enlists the power of crowdsourcing. Users are invited to sort through the hundreds of thousands of photos of Mars that have been sent back by rovers and orbiters. To convince people to spend hours pouring over pictures of dusty Martian landscapes, two tasks have been set up as games where participants can win points and badges. One game asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]. (You’ll need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight application for the games and videos on the site to work.)
By enlisting citizen scientists, NASA hopes to both interest students in space careers and to make real progress in Martian research. “We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important” [BBC News].
Related Content:
80beats: Crowdsourced Astronomy Project Discovers “Green Pea” Galaxies
80beats: Mars Rover Will Try Daring Escape From Sand Trap of Doom
80beats: Would A Mission to Mars Drive Astronauts Insane? Six Earth-Bound Volunteers Aim to Find Out.
80beats: Buzz Aldrin Speaks Out: Forget the Moon, Let’s Head to Mars
Image: JPL / Microsoft


The self-proclaimed spam king of the Internet, Sam “Spamford” Wallace, was ordered to pay Facebook $711 million in civil damages for slinging spam on the social networking site.
Yes, in early September we sent the Internet
Three scientists who mastered light through technology
Looking for an easy, cheap way to spy on your neighbors? Researchers are working on a device that may be just the thing, which uses a simple wireless network to “see” through a wall and detect people moving around in the room beyond. But paranoid apartment-dwellers will be glad to know that the system still has plenty of limitations. At the moment the system can only track movement within a three-foot range, and it can only sense motion–it can’t put together a picture of what or who’s moving.
It may not look a day over 35, but the Internet turned 40 years old today. On September 2, 1969, computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, hooked up two
Every time you go online, your
A 28-year-old
The cyber-
Evaluating the
Volunteers helping astronomers classify galaxies in an online project have identified an entirely new type of galaxy, which they dubbed “green pea” galaxies due to their resemblance to little green legumes floating in space. The
The Chinese government has banned the controversial use of electroconvulsive therapy, or shock therapy, to treat the controversial diagnosis of “Internet addiction.” With an estimated 300 million Internet users,
The first permanent node of the “interplanetary internet” has been installed and tested out aboard the
Were you born after 1988 in a small state? If so, researchers would have a particularly good chance of figuring out your Social Security number. In a new study, researchers used publicly available data, including an individual’s place and date of birth, to guess the Social Security number that would have been assigned to that person. And the study’s authors say that cyber-crooks could use similar techniques for identity theft. “We live in a precarious time, where knowledge of a Social Security number, along with other information about one’s name and date of birth, is sometimes sufficient to impersonate another individual,” said Alessandro Acquisti, the study’s lead author [
