NASA Science Live: You Too Can Do NASA Science
[Music] what if i told you that no matter who you are or where you are you can participate in science at nasa and make real world discoveries alongside nasa scientists hello i'm your host emily ferfaro and this is another virtual episode of nasa science live from mapping the ocean floors to discovering new planets outside of our solar system nasa has so many different citizen science projects where members of the public actually collaborate with nasa scientists to make amazing discoveries together nasa's chief scientist jim green is here to tell us more [Music] have you ever had an aha moment that feeling when everything just seems to make sense scientists have them all the time hi i'm jim green nasa's chief scientist and i have discovered many new things in my career and let me tell you there's nothing quite like that feeling when you discover something important that no one in the world knows what if i told you that through nasa's citizen science program you too can experience that same feeling are you interested citizen scientists working with nasa have made many significant discoveries some of them right from their own home for instance 54 000 circumstellar disks have been found by citizen scientists what are they these are debris fields around stars in our galaxy where planets are being formed for the very first time what about the citizen scientists that have discovered 18 000 mosquito breeding sites in nasa earth science images breeding sites like these are important to first find since mosquitoes carry all sorts of diseases so there are many other discoveries going on in nasa's citizen science projects and you can get involved these projects are real collaborations between scientists and a interested public like you i am sure some of you might be saying well i don't have a fancy degree or i can't discover new planets beyond our solar system and you'd be wrong you don't have to have a special degree or job title in fact you don't even need to have experience if you're curious about our universe and about our planet earth you can get involved with real nasa projects and work alongside real scientists right now so what are you waiting for come on and join us to get started go to science.nasa.gov slash citizen science see you there i don't know about you but hearing about the discoveries made by citizen scientists is so exciting if you're anything like me i science was always interesting but i never thought i could be a scientist so it was great to hear dr green talk about how anyone can get involved with these projects and make discoveries there are so many great projects that you can get involved with today on the show we'll talk about a few but if you want to learn about all of the opportunities visit science.nasa.gov citizen science did you know that planets form from vast clouds of gas dust and chunks of rock clouds that are in the shape of disks with stars at the center by searching for stars that are surrounded by these cloud disks we can find out where planets are currently forming and where other planets probably exist today finding these planet-forming disks has been a major quest of astronomers for the past three decades through a project called disk detective you can help we're joined today by dr mark kushner citizen science officer at nasa headquarters and citizen scientist hugo dorantini lucca thank you so much for being with us today thanks emily thank you so mark can you tell us a little bit more about dis detective why does nasa need help studying these objects so nasa has a wonderful problem which is that we have images of the whole sky in infrared wavelengths and the images from nasa's wise mission the wide field infrared explorer contained two billion sources and which of those sources are the planet-forming disks that's where we go to members of the public and ask for their help figuring out which of those needles in the haystack is a real planet-forming disk wow wow that's that is amazing that real people can help with this type of research um hugo you are one of those people so what has been the most exciting part about working on this project a farm in this moment is like a compilation of things since i am participating since 2014. the start for me was a final a project where i was able to participate and contribute with science and be engaged at the same time because i was trying a couple of things in that point but they were project fun projects and all but they were no interaction with science team for example and why i started to interact with mark via twitter in that point i started to learn about the project and talk back and forth with the science thing i was able to be in interact with the project because that interaction was engaging so i was able to contribute at the same time i was learning about the project how the project work how the people working in the project was that was a very important thing at first because i didn't much know much about astronomy at that point i was able to find astronomy but didn't know about the subject so be able to participate and learn and reach the discovery like the peter pan thinks from for this detective was something huge i was not even thinking into discovering at that point maybe i was only thinking participate and be able to contribute in an active way and we've been learning from you too hugo it's been a wonderful six years working together with you i feel so fortunate to be able to meet the citizen scientists that we've met through this project yeah it seems like such a great community so can can anyone get involved and help with this project what sort of experience do people need no experience necessary so you just go to diskdetective.org
there's a short online tutorial in about five minutes you're looking at data you're helping nasa and you're potentially making discoveries indeed and remember you are going to be having fun while learning so be patient if the project really caused you cut your attention you are going to have much time to learn about more details and different parts of the project so have a try and have fun that's awesome that's such good advice that was actually going to be my next question what sort of advice do you have for people that might be interested in getting started in astronomy patient is one of the key because astronomy has a lot of different things a lot of tools and surveys and catalogues and vocabulary to learn that passion patience is one of the keys aside of wanting to to learn and astronomy has also a huge variety of things to study maybe you will want to know the look of stars perfect or maybe you you want to see pretty galaxy there are also projects for that astronomy can you have a big selection of things for you there and hugo you helped us discover peter pan discs which are the oldest discs that are still forming planets so scientists we astronomers thought that disks stopped forming planets after about five million years but then the citizen scientists at this detective started finding objects that were forming that were able to form planets about nine or ten times the age of that so into the 40 and 50 million year old age range and uh you know the astronomy community is still trying to figure out what that means so that's pretty exciting that's amazing that is so cool that new discoveries have come out of this um working with with citizens and scientists yeah and maybe first people participating jack can leave you as some surprise like me when i was invited to my local tv station to an interview about that um well you became a a local celebrity for a bit uh by making a decent science discovery that is so cool wow well that's all the time we have today thank you both so much for joining us thanks for having us emily thank you for having us of course using the power of our global community nasa has developed an interactive app called nemonet it's used to characterize coral reef ecosystems around the world with unprecedented accuracy today we're joined by 10 year old citizen scientist kellen homan and nasa scientist dr vade triath to tell us more about this fun project thank you both for joining us today ben so can you tell us a little bit more about nemo net what is it sure so i invented a technology called fluid lensing at nasa and it's the first technique we've had that can look beneath the ocean waves and map corals in 3d so we've been traveling around the world using drones and this technique to map corals in 3d and the really the biggest challenge we have with all of this data is how to classify it how do we get the basic number of how many corals there are how they're doing as a function of changing ocean temperatures and that's where nemonite comes in so we built a video game that ties into our super computer and you can download it and play it on your iphone or ipad device and what you're doing in that game is looking at our data sets that we are getting from around the world with these drones and helping learn about corals at the same time as coloring them and feeding data into our super computer wow this is such a cool idea to get people involved in this project um kellen i understand that you've been working with on this project so can you tell us is nemo net more like a game or is it like school work and have you learned science by playing the game it's kind of it's kind of like a game because it's not school work you kind of get to do what you want to do you can choose where you want to be and what and what you want to do they're like 2d 3d and then there's stuff like that that sounds very fun what kind of things have you learned from playing the game there's a lot of different types of coral and there are some key regions that have coral um they are you can classify guan the great barrier reef american samoa hawaii or puerto rico coral so that seems like where the most of the coral is probably wow i didn't know that so can you show us kind of how you how you interact with this app i hear that you are so good at classifying coral that you have earned the status of sea turtle um was it hard to get to that level yup i've been playing it for yeah a few months a few months now so i have my 3d map of coral i have the types of coral on here i can hold this and then i can go to a list of all the quarter types i have what i what i can classify and like what they look like so then i'll get out of that and then we have the 3d map to you can like scroll all the directions you can look from like all directions it sounds like you're a pro so ved how are citizen scientists like kellen and their work in this app helping us understand what's what's going on with coral reefs uh i mean to put it bluntly they are changing the world and we have mapped as of 2020 around six percent of the ocean floor and one of the reasons why it's so difficult to map the ocean floor first is because it's difficult to see anything beneath ocean waves so our instrument helps fix that and reveal that environment in 3d but the second is once you have all that data it really doesn't mean anything unless you have humans come in and help annotate what it is we're looking at is it sand are we looking at sea cucumbers sea grass corals and it really becomes a complicated machine learning problem so when we first created the project we didn't have a video game in mind we were purely focused on super computing and being able to develop the tool to classify these reefs but we learned you know that the super computer results and the machine learning outputs were only as good as the training data we have at that point you know we thought all right we have we have an untapped potential across the world in our nation as well with all of these students who are interested engaged they want to explore these environments um it's it's funny that this happened during the pandemic and a lot of folks were looking for an activity to do at home that would be at once educational and benefit science and that's when we we decided to launch nemo net on earth day this year and so we've we currently have around 100 000 plus active users kellen is in our in our top 1 of pro players he outclassifies phd trained coral reef biologists regularly um history name is admiral crocodile and it's it's really just amazing how how quickly um kids in his age group pick up on classifying this is not an easy task i struggle with this you open the game you see a 3d coral which looks to you know like a loaf of bread to some people it can look like very different shapes kids have to learn what that is pass an accuracy test while painting in 3d and that's how they graduate and level up the food chain in the video game and all that data then gets compared on our super computer we can measure its statistics related to other scientists inputs other uh amateur players and it's it's really the sweet spot we found for classification is roughly kellen's age group um and the amount of time that they play the the knowledge they have in these environments is really just extraordinary so yeah i'd say we could not do it without without kids like helen this is so amazing so uh kellen do you have any advice for for people watching that might want to get involved yeah i also wanna where i i actually have the number there have been seven thousand seven hundred thousand three hundred no seventy three thousand five hundred and eighty eight classifications by everybody who's been playing nemo net that's amazing and advice is definitely take your time and like do it one at a time and definitely look and make sure you know what each choral type looks like because they do give actual pictures in the game of what the choral types look like so that's that helps classify once you when you can see what the coral type looks like and then you can put that in to your knowledge of what so what we're looking for in the game this is so cool i am just so impressed but thank you both so much for joining us let's move up into the atmosphere way up to where the auroras dance across our skies in order to track the appearance of auroras across the globe nasa supports a citizen science project called aurorasaurus where volunteers submit reports and photographs through a mobile app and website with all of this data from users around the planet researchers are able to learn more about this mysterious and dazzling phenomenon i'm joined by nasa scientist dr elizabeth mcdonald and citizen scientist donna locke thank you so much for joining us hi thank you for including me hi thanks of course so elizabeth why is it an important area of research um to have these citizen scientists contribute um regarding auroras yeah so auroras affect our technologies on earth and in the sky on in satellites and they move really quickly and it's important um to get an understanding of what they're doing even when they're really quiet or really large and citizen scientists can really help with that amazing so donna you um are a citizen scientist with this project can you uh kind of walk us through what contributing looks like sure um it's uh what our source wants is our observations from the ground wherever we are so we are their boots in the ground eyes to the sky and it starts with me watching the forecast for the aurora and the solar activity uh listening to the chatter on twitter and our facebook groups and when the conditions are right and the sky is clear i head out with my camera and i will take pictures of the aurora and after that i will report by going online to aurorasaurus or on their their app but we would uh give them our observations and upload a photo of what we saw on the ground wow and elizabeth how does that help you with your research well knowing um exactly what time it was and where the person was when they saw the aurora allows us to put all of those different images together along with our traditional observations and understand the phenomena in more depth what kind of discoveries have citizen scientists made with this project so one big one is something called steve which is actually an aurora that can be seen um further away from the poles than the usual aurora so overhead over southern canada and the northern u.s and it's very unusual it kind of looks like an airplane condensation trail but with a photograph you can pick up these amazing colors as well and by studying it further with satellite data and other data from the ground we've discovered it's it's really like a flow driven aurora it's an east to west flow that is lighting up the sky and doing some amazing kind of new unusual aurora auroral activity that's still being studied now wow that is amazing so i've only seen aurora's in in videos and images what is it like to to see it firsthand my latitude in southern manitoba it's it just looks like a white light maybe with a green tint to it when it's active then sometimes i can see the pink fringe along the bottom and sometimes i can also see the red that goes high above but uh most of the time it's only about 30 degrees above the horizon where i am once in a while it will go overhead and it starts with uh just a low band if we hit a get to a substorm then it will start dancing for about 30 seconds to about 20 minutes and that's the very exciting part that we want to photograph and after that is a very subtle um pulsating yeah pulsating um aurora that is difficult to actually see with the eyes but the camera can really capture it beautifully that is just amazing and so we only have a couple seconds left but could you how do you have a couple pieces of advice for people that want to get involved i would say please join us because it's it's a very exciting thing to be involved with to be able to report uh and share what i see i'm not a scientist i don't have a great camera i don't uh i'm not a professional but i can be involved in something that's really important and right now in this time of social distancing we're looking for something to do outside and we can do this on our own we don't need to worry about social distancing and we can link arms with everyone across the globe to be a part of something very exciting like this yeah virtually we can get together and also it's really a great bridge between the public and the scientific community and it spurs a lot of great communication and um questions about what we're seeing so yeah we encourage people to join us be patient the sun we have to wait for the sun and the sky to be clear and that can take a while but you can join our community and learn more in the meantime so everyone is welcome awesome thank you both so much thank you if you're interested in astronomy and looking to the sky this next project might be for you the international astronomical search collaboration also known as isaac is a program that allows citizen scientists all around the world to analyze nasa's high quality data of near-earth objects things like asteroids and comets with this data volunteers are able to make discoveries of new asteroids in our solar system and near earth i'm joined by isaac founder dr patrick miller and citizen scientist ludwig aldolfo fernandez thank you both for joining us thank you so patrick this sounds like an exciting project could you tell us more about it yes uh we uh we started this project in uh in in 2006 i think we had like five teams participating now we've got over 3000 teams from 80 countries around the world to participate uh we provide images from large telescopes uh at the university of hawaii uh the pan stars uh sky survey and also the university of arizona the catalina sky survey uh we take these images we process them and then send them out to teams of citizen scientists around the world and their job is to look through these these images and find discoveries of of asteroids and occasionally near earth objects wow this is really important work um so ludwing you've been involved with this project um can you tell us how how you participate and what sort of skills someone would need to get involved well uh well i managed the campaign for bolivia it's named all bolivian as the research campaign this campaign is pretty neo and we are working with isaac since 2018 and to this day more than one thousand students participated in the campaign there isn't like a list of skills to participate but the student needs to meet some requirements such as having a computer and have an internet connection sometimes the school is in charge of that well but the most important is to have the desire to learn and to make to contribute to observation of asteroids wow okay so what kind of observations and discoveries have you been able to make here well the living campaign we have made more than 400 uh probably preliminar asteroids and seven provisional asteroids so as bolivian campaign we also participated in special campaigns that are competitive among the best 10 teams of the world amazing so uh dr miller how did does the work of citizen scientists help with your research the the citizen scientists are are finding objects that are actually not reported by the large sky surveys their citizen scientists are able to look at these images and see deeper into the images than the automated detection utilities conducted either by pan stars or catalina so those are important observations because they're finding things that are that are missed in the original in the original data wow that is quite incredible what an important project and it's very cool that citizen scientists can help with this um so what advice do both of you have for other people that want to get involved here well from isaac's point of view if you'd like to participate you're welcome to come to our website and we have a registration form and uh the staff and i will be happy to work with you uh it takes a day or two once you uh send in your interests uh and then we'll get you set up and participating before you know it and it's free yeah for me is that don't be afraid to apply it's a great opportunity to make important discoveries in asteroids so there is a great experience it's free and it's open for everyone amazing great advice thank you both so much for the work that you're doing and for being with us here today so today we have explored our oceans our skies and planets that are far far away and we've learned that you too can be a scientist from your very own home let's see how the kids in this next video have been contributing to nasa research from the place where they live nasa has scientists posted all over the world studying earth's frozen regions we've got people exploring ice sheets glaciers permafrost sea ice snow and even ice on other planets but even our top scientists need a little backup sometimes do you like going outside to do science yeah why because it's fun yeah what's your favorite part frost tube frost we're following the micro explorers that are helping nasa collect data from their own backyard do you think it's going to be frozen why because it's very rounded here's the idea students construct a frost tube that gets put into a hole in undisturbed and uncompacted soil during the cold months students will measure the depth at which water in the frost tube freezes indicating that the surrounding soil has frozen this is one of many citizen science projects facilitated by globe the global learning and observations to benefit the environment program what's going on how far down is the ice so is there still liquid in there it's a worldwide program that so far has collected over 130 million measurements from more than 10 million students in 113 countries are you scientists these measurements are added to a massive worldwide database that's free and open to the public globe connects my students with the rest of the world through science and looking at climate change and how it's affecting the future globe teachers like terry are transforming the way kids see science and how they'll respond to changes in their future environment sorry see your happy face thank you all for joining us today to learn about citizen science if you want to become a citizen scientist yourself visit science.nasa.gov citizen science and explore all of the projects that need you there's science that can be done by anyone anywhere all across the globe with just a cell phone or a laptop you can also follow do nasa science on twitter and facebook to stay informed of the latest updates and discoveries thank you so much for watching nasa science live until next time you
2020-12-19 18:48
