Oral Presentation

Citizen Science in Astronomy

Author(s): Meg Schwamb, Planet Hunters team & Planet Four team

Presenter: Meg Schwamb (ASIAA)

Referred to as ‘crowdsourcing’ or ‘citizen science’, the combined assessment of many non-expert human classifiers with minimal training can often equal or best that of a trained expert and in many cases outperform the best machine-learning algorithm. As astronomical datasets move into the petabyte regime, citizen science will be one of the ways forward to tackle the data deluge produced by the next generation observatories such as LSST and the SKA.

I will highlight results from two projects I am directly involved in utilizing citizen science to mine large astronomy and planetary science-based datasets:

Planet Hunters (http://www.planethunters.org), uses the World Wide Web to enlist the general public to identify transits in the Kepler light curves that may be missed by automated detection algorithms looking for periodic events. Volunteers are asked to draw boxes to mark the locations of visible planet transits, with multiple independent classifiers reviewing a randomly selected ~30-day light curve segment from one of Kepler's ~160,000 target stars. Since December 2010, more than 290,000 members of the general public have participated in Planet Hunters contributing over 22 million classifications.

During the summer on the South Pole of Mars, carbon dioxide geysers loft dust and dirt through cracks in the thawing carbon dioxide ice sheet to the surface where it is believed the surface winds subsequently sculpt the material into the hundreds of thousands of dark fans and blotches observed from orbit. It is difficult if not impossible for computer algorithms to accurately identify individual fans and blotches that are easily spotted by eye. Planet Four (http://www.planetfour.org), launched in January 2013, enlists over 100,000 citizen scientists to examine high-resolution images, from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and map the sizes, shapes, and orientations of these features. Planet Four will produce a seasonal wind map of the South Pole of Mars and reveal how it changes over time and is impacted year to year by the Martian climate.