Citizens, scientists want YOU!
Yes, that's right -- one of the most valuable tools for any scientist is the help of informed and interested people; people who can be places where the scientist isn't and who can provide extra eyes and hands to help with research. Now a newly-launched sister site of Galaxy Zoo is looking for people who are interested in helping scientists search the surface of the Moon.
The Moon Zoo website takes advantage of lessons learned from the very successful Galaxy Zoo website. Researchers placed millions of high resolution images from the NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) on the website. After going through a series of pages explaining how to classify objects, Moon Zoo asks volunteers to classify and measure different kinds of features found on the moon's surface. Things that they are particularly interested in is the number and size of craters in each area, locating lava channels, crater chains, volcanoes, lava floods from meteor impacts, and boulders found at the edge of impact craters. Moon Zoo volunteers also help identify recent changes on the moon by comparing photos from the Apollo missions and from the LRO cameras. They also hope to locate space mission hardware -- not only the famous Apollo landing modules and Lunar rovers, but European lunar probe mission hardware and probes sent to the moon by the Chinese. To date, over a million images have been processed by volunteers -- less than 6 months' worth of photographs.
For the curious novice, the site has many pages to delight you with fascinating information -- from a page about the Moon's atmosphere (yes, it does have one but it's almost nonexistent: http://www.moonzoo.org/Lunar_Atmosphere) to the Planetary Science page (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planets/moonpage.html), there's something for everyone here on this site.
And then there are the photos -- confirmed landing sites (http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=174.0 -- the hardware is very small, and you have to look closely to really observe one), crater chains (http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=107.0) , and more.
The one downside to me is that the Moon is monochromatic for the most part, and I miss some of the beautiful colors of the galaxies in Galaxy Zoo. But there's plenty of interesting photos on both sites and a real need for interested people to learn to classify objects. All in all, it's a great evening hobby for an armchair scientist!
