New Study Gives Crowdsourced Research the Thumbs Up

March 17, 2014 By IdeaConnection

631px-FullMoon2010Crowdsourcing is an effective tool for planetary science says a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The research concluded that members of the public are just as effective at spotting lunar craters as people with 5 to 50 years’ experience.

A huge crater counting effort was launched by CosmoQuest, a citizen science Web project. Amateurs and experts were invited to analyze high-resolution photos of the moon taken by a camera onboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2009.

Images of parts of the moon were uploaded to a website and planetary and citizen scientists identified craters of 18 or more pixels. The work is important because it can feed into studies about cosmic collisions in the early Solar System as well as spot potential hazards for future moon missions.

Power of Crowdsourcing

With hundreds of millions of craters on the lunar surface, it’s a case of all hands on deck to spot them. Scientists are reassured that they can rely on the crowd’s valuable input.

“What we can say is that a very large group of volunteers was able to chart these features on the moon just as well as professional researchers,” said Research Scientist Stuart Robbins of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, who led the study.

“More importantly, we now have evidence that we can use the power of crowdsourcing to gather more reliable data from the moon than we ever thought was possible before.”

 

 


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