Pamela Gay
Human Exploration of Space - from Your Desktop
Modern day astronomy and space science is being transformed by the preponderance of
data collected via survey telescopes and spacecraft. As an example, the Solar Dynamic
Orbiter returns more data each day than the Voyager mission returned during its entire
two-spacecraft tour of the outer solar system! In order to handle this large influx of data,
NASA missions are turning toward the public and asking everyday people to help
annotate images to find the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary. One family of
these projects, CosmoQuest, has been developed here at SIUE. In this talk, the story of
citizen science is told by one of the modern pioneers, and the audience will learn how
they too can be a part of the ongoing discoveries.