[meteorite-list] Citizen Scientists: Discover a New Horizons Flyby Target

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:34:41 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201106231634.p5NGYfAW026758_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20110621.php

Citizen Scientists: Discover a New Horizons Flyby Target
New Horizons Project
June 21, 2011

The world is invited to help discover a potential new, icy follow-on
destination for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, using the Ice Hunters
<http://icehunters.org> website. New Horizons is currently en route to
make the first flyby of the Pluto system, and is then capable of
exploring additional bodies still farther out in the Kuiper Belt.

Through this citizen science project, the public can help scientists
search through specially-obtained telescopic images for currently
unknown objects in the Kuiper Belt. Along the way, they will also
discover variable stars and asteroids. Ice Hunters is a Zooniverse
citizen science project.

"The New Horizons project is breaking new ground in many ways," says
mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research
Institute. "We're flying by a new kind of planet, we'll be making the
most distant encounters with planetary bodies in the history of space
exploration, and now we're employing citizen science to help find our
potential extended mission flyby targets, perhaps a billion kilometers
farther than even distant Pluto and its moons.

"We're very excited to be working with Zooniverse and breaking this new
kind of ground," Stern says. "We hope the public will be excited to join
in with us and with Zooniverse to make a little history of their own by
discovering our next flyby target after Pluto."

On the outer edges of the solar system an icy body lurks undiscovered,
orbiting on a path that will just happen to carry it toward a potential
rendezvous with the New Horizons spacecraft. This mission is on course
for a 2015 flyby of Pluto, an encounter that begins New Horizons'
exploration of the Kuiper Belt. After visiting Pluto, the spacecraft
will have enough fuel remaining to change its course to fly toward at
least one and possibly two Kuiper Belt objects in the outer solar system
- an object the Ice Hunters website is designed to find. The expected
date of the KBO flyby will be between 2016 and 2020, depending on the
object chosen and its distance from Pluto.

The Kuiper Belt, a region of the outer solar system extending past
Neptune, contains small or "dwarf" planets; these are icy objects of a
variety of sizes up to thousands of kilometers across. The first KBO
other than Pluto was only discovered in 1992, and the KBO population is
still not well mapped. Ice Hunters will do its part to study one small
slice of the Kuiper Belt as it looks for an object along New Horizons'
trajectory after its Pluto flyby.

If that object can be found, it will become the most distant object ever
visited by a spacecraft from Earth.

[Diagram]
Diagram of the Kuiper Belt's location in the solar system; the yellow
line marks Pluto's orbit.

Using some of the largest telescopes in the world, scientists have
imaged that region, producing millions of pictures that could contain
images of the rare objects that are orbiting toward just the right
location, along with many other small worlds on different trajectories.
Ice Hunters users will be charged with marking these moving targets for
follow-up examination.

The images contained in IceHunters.org are "difference" images, created
by subtracting observations taken at two different times. By subtracting
the two images, scientists can mostly (but not entirely) remove the
light from constant sources like stars and galaxies. Left behind are the
things that move or vary in brightness: Kuiper Belt objects, asteroids,
and variable stars. Since the stars never subtract off perfectly, the
images appear messy, and computers can't be trained to find objects as
effectively as a people can.

The search team will use the millions of mouse clicks made by Ice
Hunters users to identify objects moving on orbits that New Horizons
might reach. "When you're looking for something special in masses of
messy, real-world data, sometimes there's no substitute for the human
eye, and Zooniverse Ice Hunters will put thousands of eyes to work on
this important job," says John Spencer, of Southwest Research Institute,
a member of the New Horizons science team who is coordinating the search
effort.

New Horizons launched in January 2006, and is the first NASA New
Frontiers mission. It tested its instruments during a 2007 flyby of the
planet Jupiter, and scientists now eagerly await its July 2015 flight
through the Pluto system. With this encounter, the U.S. becomes the
first nation to visit all of the classical planets. If approved by NASA,
the extended New Horizons journey to one or more other (and far, far
smaller) targets in the Kuiper Belt will allow scientists, for the first
time, to study up close the diversity of characteristics seen among
Kuiper Belt objects.

The Ice Hunters project was produced at Southern Ilinois University
Edwardsville as part of the Zooniverse, a collection of websites
administered by the Citizen Science Alliance. More than 400,000
Zooniverse volunteers are already making important contributions to such
diverse topics as the classification of galaxies in Hubble images,
reconstruction of historical records of Earth's weather, and analysis of
close-up pictures of the moon's surface. The public is invited to
become a part of this and all other Zooniverse projects at Zooniverse.org.
Received on Thu 23 Jun 2011 12:34:41 PM PDT