Citizen science is an important aspect of any science field, the collaboration & cooperation of additional researchers and data analysers can make such a positive contribution and save a significant amount of time enabling scientists to do further work that would otherwise be held back.
I work with a research group that is partnered with the private space firm, Planetary Resources Inc., who some of you may have heard of. They are involved with the concept of mining asteroids and they developed the first publicly accessible space telescope (the ARKYD-100) which will be put into LEO (low Earth orbit) later this year, this is a first of it's kind and enables the public to use an advanced scientific instrument to image most astronomical objects without the planetary issues of time and weather distortion.
We are collaborating with them and some additional partners for the purpose of asteroid & comet research. The research project will be monitoring and tracking both known and newly discovered NEO's (near Earth objects), PHA's (potentially hazardous asteroids), main belt asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, comets and specific fields.
We're asking assistance from citizen scientists to help with observing these objects, as the more data we are able to collect, the better we can assess target trajectory, mass, rotational period, astrometry and additional details, our science team will be doing similar observations, but using astronomical research methods and tools to enable greater understanding of these objects than we have had before. Those citizen scientists who are currently contributing to this project, and those that join during the continued project period, are providing important information on these objects that the science team is not able to measure due to time & resource constraints (we have to focus on the scientific analysis we are doing), this contributes to greater scientific analysis and understanding of these objects and assists the scientific community and the public to learn the same about them.
If you have participated in citizen scientist research before, as a direct researcher, or doing data analysis through the Zooniverse project (they are a partner of ours as well) or other, and would be interested in becoming involved with this project, we ask that you contact us through this blog, so that we may discuss in greater detail what you will be doing.
All of our citizen science partners receive full credit and citation for their observations & data analysis, whether that be in data submission to various organisations and groups, research papers, or in press releases.
