Need something to do on those cloudy nights? Why not join the Ice Hunters!
A team from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville has developed the website IceHunters, which challenges the public to discover potential destinations for a NASA mission at the very edge of the solar system set to happen around 2015.
Dozens of images from the Kuiper Belt – an area beyond Neptune at the outer edges of the solar system – have been taken by powerful telescopes and posted on the website. Participants are invited to view the images and mark potential targets of interest. Guidelines and a brief tutorial will help volunteers interpret what to look for in the images. The site is called IceHunters because objects far from the sun should be cold and icy.
But this isn’t simply an academic exercise. The New Horizons mission that launched from the Kennedy Space Center in 2006 is on its way to the outer solar system. The spacecraft flew past Jupiter in 2007 giving scientists a wealth of new data. It is scheduled to rendezvous with Pluto in 2015.
If the right object or objects can be found – anything from comets to asteroids to other unknowns – the spacecraft will take images and other measurements and beam them back to Earth for study. After the rendezvous, scientists believe the spacecraft will have just enough fuel to head deeper into the Kuiper Belt.
For more information about this project, check out this article:
Volunteer Stargazers Needed for NASA Mission
or go directly to
www.icehunters.org
