You Can Help NASA as a Citizen scientist

In 2003, NASA launched a pair of twin rovers to Mars. Spirit and Opportunity landed on opposite sides of the Red Planet in early 2004. But Spirit became stuck in deep sand in 2010 while Opportunity continued functioning until 2018. Those two were followed by Curiosity, still going strong on the Martian surface. But Curiosity’s wheels became worn down early in its mission due to traveling over a field of tough, sharp rocks.

NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars, credit NASA

Now, NASA is asking for your help in training Curiosity to recognize and avoid terrain that might cause a problem. NASA partnered with the citizen science site Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org). Zooniverse contains dozens of projects that citizen scientists, you, can help with. I have written about Zooniverse in several past columns, but the site is constantly adding new projects at the request of scientists around the world. There are many subjects that researchers need help in ranging from Arts to Language, History, Medicine, and Physics, just to name a few. Once you register on the site, you can join in any of the projects. Some Zooniverse volunteers have made significant discoveries and are even named as collaborators on the scientific papers produced with their help.

 The project that helps Curiosity drive safely is called AI4Mars. Not only will it help Curiosity, it will also teach the next Mars rover, Perseverance, expected to launch in July. For now, Curiosity needs your help as its wheels are already compromised, and NASA doesn’t want it to meet the same fate as Spirit.

Mars Perseverance Rover set for launch in late July 2020, credit NASA

The Zooniverse website describes the AI4Mars project goal: “By participating in this project, you will help improve the rovers’ ability to identify different, sometimes dangerous, terrain - an essential skill for autonomous exploration!

 “Terrain is important to get around on Mars. Spirit got stuck in a sandpit and ended its mission after 7 years of exploring Mars. Opportunity and Curiosity also have experienced getting stuck in sand, although they were able to continue on their missions. Don’t you think it would be nice if the Mars rover could identify dangerous terrain by herself? That is what a team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working on using Machine learning – essentially the same technology used by self-driving cars on Earth. To do so, the rover needs training data to learn from.

“We're counting on citizen scientists' help in labeling a set of images captured by Mars rovers so that we collectively create the Solar System's first public benchmark for Martian terrain classification.”

AI4Mars is only one of 96 projects on the Zooniverse site where scientists in all disciplines ask for the help of citizen scientists like yourself. If you have always liked science but thought you just weren’t cut out for it, this is where you can help real scientists do real, important science.

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and www.newsok.com.