If you’re into astronomy, (chuckles lightly), you have most likely heard of the Osiris Rex mission to the asteroid Bennu. Part of that mission is to do a sample return of an actual piece of an asteroid. The folks at the Planetary Science Institute, that wrote the software to help determine the best place for Osiris Rex to go in close to acquire said sample, have hit a major hurdle. There are, on the order of magnitude of hundreds, MANY more mappable objects per image of the asteroids surface than they had anticipated. They had originally based the software from previous images of asteroid Itokowa. They believed Bennu and Itokowa would be similar in surface features. They are NOT.
To help resolve this the folks at CosmoQuest have created a citizen science web utility that will allow you to mark potential hazards/targets/features that can be fed into their algorithm to select the best target for sample acquisition. YOU could be the lucky person to have their image accepted as the target area for a full fledged NASA mission. If your image is chosen as a preliminary candidate and then the final selection, you would personally be notified via email by the director of CosmoQuest herself, Dr Pamela Gay.
The process is fairly simple, register to participate at the link below, go through a sample tutorial using the images from asteroid Itokowa and then start mapping the images of Bennu via the web based utility. Each image has to be mapped by a minimum of 15 participants to eliminate human error and bias. Currently there have been just over 1300 mapped images and a little over 2200 images available to be mapped. 4700 total images will be available to be mapped as the final selection date approaches. Yes that is right, the image data is STILL coming in from the spacecraft itself. It is TEDIOUS but very important work. Can you help.
Here is the primary crux of this outreach. They are on a time crunch. The due date for all mapped images is July 10,2019 for NASA to make their final target selection. So the more eyes that can be gotten into the project the better.
>>>> Bennu Mappers at CosmoQuest <<<<
>>>> Bennu Mappers FAQ <<<<