Crowdsourcing a map of the moon
by Duncan Geere
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Since NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter arrived at its destination, 50km above the surface of the Moon back in June 2009, it's been sending back massively detailed images of the cratered surface to scientists on Earth.Over the course of the mission, it's expected that 70 - 100 terabytes of data will be collected using a pair of narrow-angle cameras and a wide-angle camera that can scan the surface at a resolution of 0.5 metres per pixel, and detect objects less than 0.5m in height. That's great, but with the Moon's 37.8 million sq km surface area, the management of all that data is proving a nightmare.So an Oxford astrophysicist named Chris Lintott has stepped in to ask the world's population of amateur astronomers to help out. He's started a project called Moon Zoo that invites anybody to help categorise the hundreds of thousands of rocks, craters and other obstacles on the surface that need sorting and measuring. It's based on his similar Galaxy Zoo project, that asks people to look at images from the Hubble telescope and label the galaxies they see.Participants can choose between Crater Survey and Boulder Wars. People who choose the first are shown a randomly selected picture of the surface of the moon and asked to place a marker at the centre of any visible craters. A circle will then appear, which can be resized to match the size of the crater. If the craters have boulders around them, then they should be marked with "some" or "many".Boulder Wars is simpler -- participants are shown two images of the surface, and have to choose which has the most boulders in it -- the objective being to identify the flatter zones, which are more suitable for spacecraft to land on. While you're sorting through pictures of boulders, keep your eyes peeled for other weird stuff. The images are of a high enough resolution that you should be able to spot various Apollo lunar descent stages and their landing sites, as well as the smaller Soviet Luna landers and rovers. If you see something particularly notable, whether it's manmade, geological or just plain odd, then you can flag it with a square feature tool.Lintott told NPR that the reason why volunteers are being used, rather than computers, is that: "Computers don't make discoveries. They don't point at the thing in the corner and ask the question: What's that?" Don't be afraid that you won't be accurate enough, either. Random checks on the data being submitted have been carried out by the scientists behind the programme, and Lintott says that they're "as good as you would get from an expert".
Edited by George Barrow
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