NASA 需要你：6个途径帮助天文学家

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来源：http://www.distributedcomputing.info/news.html
原载：Wired Magazine - http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/citizen-space-science-gallery/all/1
标题：NASA Needs You: 6 Ways to Help an Astronomer - NASA 需要你：6个途径帮助天文学家
作者：Lisa Grossman
日期：2010年6月28日
概要：业余天文学家可以通过六种方式推动天文学的发展，例如寻找陨石、或参加 Mars Student Imaging Project、HiWish、Be a Martian、Stardust@Home、Galaxy Zoo、Moon Zoo 等等人工协助类项目。

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NASA Needs You: 6 Ways to Help an Astronomer
美国宇航局需要你：6个途径帮助天文学家


Space is a big place, and even with their giant telescopes, astronomers just can’t cover it all. This is where you come in. Yes, you.
太空巨大浩淼，天文学家动用他们巨大的望远镜，也无法涵盖一切。现在你来了，对的，就是你。

Astronomy is one of the few scientific fields where amateur scientists can, and frequently do, make significant contributions. But now space scientists are increasingly also looking to people with little or no training for help with their research. Sometimes they are looking for free labor for tasks that humans can still do better than computers, like identifying different types of galaxies. Other times it’s numbers of eyes on the sky or feet on the ground they’re after. But more and more, they are finding ways to get regular citizens involved.
天文学是业余科学家能够而且经常做出重大贡献的少数科学中的一个。但是现在太空科学家正越来越多地寻找一些几乎没有受过训练的人来帮助开展他们的研究。有时候他们寻找到的免费劳动力在一些任务中能够比计算机做得更好，例如识别不同类型的星系。也有的时候，有许多追随天文学家的人脚踏实地地凝神注视着天空。但是更多的是，天文学家正想方设法地让普通公民参与进来。

Amateur astronomers and regular folks have already had an impact on the science by making observations of fleeting cosmic phenomena that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
业余天文学家们、合法公民们已经通过对那些不被注意的宇宙现象的观察在科学史上产生了影响。

When an asteroid or a comet hit Jupiter in July 2009 and then again earlier this month, amateur astronomers in Australia and the Philippines were the first to notice. Amateurs have invented new telescopes, kept tabs on variable stars and discovered comets. And you don’t even need any fancy equipment.
2009年7月有一个小行星或彗星撞击木星、本月早些时候，澳大利亚和菲律宾的业余天文学家都是第一个发现并公布的。业余天文学家们已经发明了新的望远镜，对变星和彗星密集关注。而你们甚至不需要任何精制的设备。

"We can learn a lot from someone taking a cellphone video of a meteor as it burns up in the atmosphere," said Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.
“我们获得了许多人用手机录制的流星在大气层中燃烧的视频”，美国宇航局微流星体环境办公室的 Bill Cooke 说。

But what if you’re not the lucky one who is in the right place at the right time? You are still needed. Citizen scientists have also become crucial for helping astronomers with one of their most intractable problems: too much data, too little time.
但如果您并不幸运，不是一个在正确的时间观测正确的位置，我们仍然需要您。公民科学家在天文学家面对的最棘手的问题上——太多的数据、太少的时间——提供了至关重要的帮助。

Here are some astronomy projects you can take part in right now, while you wait for your iPhone to capture a meteor.
下面是一些您可以马上参与的天文学项目，现在，就用您的 iPhone 来捕捉一颗流星吧！

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Hunt for Meteorites
捕捉流星

Last month, NASA tried to recruit meteorite hunters when cameras at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center recorded the path of a meteor from its home in the asteroid belt to just 23 miles above the Earth’s surface. The 60-pound rock is thought to have smashed into the ground near Scottsboro, Alabama, on May 18.
上个月，美国宇航局马歇尔航天飞行中心(NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center)的相机记录下一颗从小行星带来的流星掠过距离地表仅仅23英里的路径，于是，美国宇航局准备招聘捕捉流星的猎人。5月18日，一块60磅重的陨石重击在亚拉巴马州斯科茨伯勒附近地面上。

“This is the first time our cameras picked up something we thought produced meteorites on the ground,” Cooke said. “If we find the one in Scottsboro, we know exactly where it came from.”
“这是我们的相机第一次拍摄到一些我们认为是在地面上的陨石”，Cooke 说，“如果我们在斯科茨伯勒发现一个，我们知道它来自哪个确切的地方。”

Knowing both the path the meteorite took and what it’s made of would give scientists a complete picture of the rock’s life, and they were anxious to find it. But after two days of searching, NASA’s meteorite basket came up empty.
如果能清楚陨石飞来的路径及其物质构成，科学家们就能知道这块岩石生活的全貌，所以他们急于寻找到它。但在经过两天的寻找之后，美国宇航局的陨石搜寻库就空了。

So Cooke called on the masses. NASA issued a press release on May 20 asking anyone who found a funny rock near Scottsboro to call them.
Cooke 只能呼吁大众。美国宇航局5月20日发表新闻稿，如果谁在斯科茨伯勒附件发现了一块奇特的岩石，请联系他们。

“People in the public contribute a lot to meteor science,” Cooke said. “My hope was that it landed on somebody’s farm, and they thought, ‘Where the heck did that rock come from?’”
“公众为流星科学作出了很多贡献”，Cooke 说，“我希望，它能坠落在某个农场里面，农场里的人会莫名的问‘这块岩石到底是从哪里来的？’”

So far nobody has found the rock Cooke is after.
到目前为止，仍然没有任何人发现 Cooke 所说的岩石。

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Mars Student Imaging Project
火星学生影像项目

A group of 16 middle schoolers recently found a cave on Mars while taking part in the Mars Student Imaging Project, NASA reported on June 17. The project invites fifth graders through college sophomores to develop a question about geological processes on Mars, and then lets them steer the camera on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft to find the answers. Since it started in 2004, more than 50,000 students have participated, answering questions from “What are the relationships between wind streaks and craters?” to “How can comparing Earth channels to channels on Mars help us to find possible water sources on Mars?”
美国宇航局6月17日报道，一个由16名中学生组成的小组在参与火星学生影像项目(Mars Student Imaging Project)时，发现了火星上的一个洞穴。火星学生影像项目邀请十五个年级的学生针对火星地质作用提出问题，然后让他们指挥火星奥德赛号飞船上的摄像机来寻找答案。该项目自2004年启动以来，已有超过50,000名学生参与，问答涵盖面广，从“风条纹和环形山之间有什么关系”到“如果通过比较地球和火星上的沟渠，来帮助我们寻找火星上的水源”等等问题，千奇百怪，应有尽有。

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HiWish

Another Martian portrait painter, the HiRISE, or High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, has been taking stunning close-ups of Mars since 2006. In January, the team gave the public a shot at the shutter button. With HiWish, anyone with a web connection can suggest the next place on Mars to point the camera.
HiRISE 又是一个火星肖像画家，或者说是一个高分辨率成像的科学实验，安装在火星侦察器上的照相机从2006年开始就在拍摄火星的特写镜头。今年一月，项目团队向公众开放了一个快门按钮。通过 HiWish，任何人都可以通过网站来建议照相机在火星上拍摄的下一个地点。

The site got hundreds of suggestions in the first few days, and the first eight images were released on March 31. Suggestions are ranked based on scientific interest. When you make a suggestion, you can choose two of 17 science themes — like Climate Change, Future Exploration/Landing Sites, or Volcanic Processes — that you think fit your suggestion.
该网站在刚开始的几天里，就获得了成百上千个拍摄地点的建议，其中前八张相片已于3月31日公布。这些建议地点按公众的科学兴趣进行分类。当您要提交一个建议地点时，您可以在17个科学主题中选择2个——例如气候变化，未来探索/落地点，或者火山作用——与您的建议地点相关即可。

The HiRISE blog offers some tips for improving your chances of having your suggestion selected:
• Make sure you justify your choice based on small features like boulders or dunes, not big ones like volcanoes or channels. Mars has been photographed extensively already, so the suggestions that make the best use of HiRISE’s meter-scale resolution are the most interesting.
• Choose an appropriate science theme (mark impact craters with “Impact Processes” rather than “Volcanic Processes,” for instance).
• Go for the ugly duckling regions of Mars, ones that haven’t already received lots of attention.
HiRISE 博客为帮助您更好的选择建议地点，给出了以下建议：
• 确保您的选择是基于像石头或沙丘之类的小玩意儿，而不是像火山或渠道一样的大玩意儿。火星已经被广泛的拍摄了，所以建议地点最好能将 HiRISE 米级分辨率功能发挥到极致。
• 选择一个适当的科学主题(例如，对撞击坑的标记选择“Impact Processes”比选择“Volcanic Processes”要更好一些)。
• 前往火星上尚未获得大量关注的丑小鸭地带。

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Be a Martian
做个火星

The “Be a Martian” tool, a joint project between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Microsoft, has by far the sleekest user interface of any crowdsourced Mars exploration program. The science activities are basic but useful: Users can count craters or align images of Mars from two different orbiting cameras, MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter) on Mars Global Surveyor and THEMIS (THermal EMission Imaging System) on Mars Odyssey.
“做个火星”工具，由美国航天局喷气推进实验室和微软联合开发，它是迄今为止任何与火星探测的相关的众包项目中用户界面最友好的。它可以进行最基本但是最有效的科学活动，例如：用户可以在火星的火山口从两个不同的轨道来调整照相机、使用火星全球测量太空船上的 MOLA (火星轨道高度仪) 和 THEMIS(热辐射成像系统)对火星进行整体探测。

But the whole thing is couched in a make-believe Martian civilization. You can sign up as a Martian citizen, discuss and vote on issues (basically, ask questions on a message board and give thumbs up to favorite posts), watch videos from JPL in the Two Moons Theater, and send postcards to the rover Spirit. A dramatic introductory video intones, “Mars exploration is a civilization endeavor, no longer restricted to the intrepid few, but to all who wish to share in the journey of discovery…. Join us, and we can work together to create the most comprehensive global mosaic of Mars in human history.”
但是，所有事情都是在虚构火星文明。您可以注册成为一名火星公民，参与讨论和投票(聊天室的常规内容、在留言板上提问、给喜欢的帖子竖起大拇指等等)，在喷气推进实验室双月影剧院观看录像，通过火星车送明信片。注册页面有一段招募火星公民的视频广告——“火星探测是对一种文明的努力，已不再局限于少数科学家，而是面向所有希望分享发现之旅的人们……加入我们吧！让我们一起将人类的历史镶嵌到创建最全面的火星历程中去。”

If you like this kind of theatricality, have at it. But if you prefer your Mars exploration straight up, THEMIS has its own, pared-down public mapping project, too.
如果您喜欢这种戏剧形式，可以加入其中。但是，如果您更喜欢火星探测器的飞行、THEMIS 的探测，您也可以关注 public mapping project(公共测绘项目)。

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Stardust@Home

Stardust was the first spacecraft to bring home bits of a comet. It returned to Earth on Jan. 15, 2006, carrying chunks of the comet Wild 2 and speckles of stardust — literally bits of interstellar dust born in distant stars. The comet pieces numbered in the thousands and were easy to find. But scientists estimate the spacecraft collected only about 45 particles of stardust, each of which is just a millionth of a meter across.
Stardust(星尘号飞船)是第一个从彗星的彗发中穿过的航天器。2006年1月15日，星尘号携带着“怀尔特2(Wild2)”彗星的微粒和更为稀少的珍宝——源于遥远恒星的星际尘埃微粒。从彗星收集到的上千个大小不一的微粒，很容易找到。然后，科学家估计星尘号仅收集到了大约 45 个星际尘埃微粒，它们很小——仅有微米(百万分之一米)大小！

So rather than poring over the 1,000-square-centimeter detector one painstaking microscope frame at a time, the Stardust@Home project uses an automated scanning microscope to make hundreds of thousands of images of the detector, and posts them online. Speck candidates will be ranked based on many different viewings to find the ones most likely to really hold some dust.
这些稀少又微小的微粒埋在 1000 平方厘米大小的气凝胶中，使用高倍显微镜来寻找轨迹需要很数十年的时间，Stardust@Home 项目采用自动扫描显微镜来自动收集整个星尘收集器的图像数据，形成数十万张胶片，并提供在网站上。基于许多不同的视角筛选出来的候选微粒，将被排名，从最有可能性的微粒开始复测是否是真正的星际尘埃。

“No one’s sure what exactly the stardust tracks will look like, so we won’t be able to recognize them until we’ve found one,” the website says.
“没有人知道星尘究竟是什么样子的，除非我们能发现其中一个，我们才可能认识星尘”，该网站上说。

If you discover a bit of stardust, you’ll get your name on the scientific paper announcing it. You’ll also get to name your bit.
如果您发现了一个星尘，您的名字将出现在任何一篇 Stardust@home 协作宣布的微粒发现的科学论文中。同时，被发现星尘的名字将由您来命名。

These nearly invisible bits of dust are important because, as Carl Sagan famously said, “We are starstuff.” The heavy elements that ultimately formed the planets, and us, were built in distant stars, and floated around the interstellar medium as stardust after those stars died. This is the stuff that solar systems are made of.
这些几乎看不见的尘埃非常重要，正如 Carl Sagan 的一句名言所说“我们都是星尘”。星尘建造了我们的行星，也包括我们，在遥远的恒星死亡后，它们浮游在星际空间里。它们是遥远恒星的重要组成部分。

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Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo
银河动物园和月球动物园

Want to classify galaxy shapes? There’s an app for that. As of June 21, Galaxy Zoo is available on the iPhone.
想对星系的形状进行分类吗？这里正好有一个程序。从6月21日开始，Galaxy Zoo(银河动物园)能在 iPhone 上使用了。

Galaxy Zoo asks users to help identify and classify more than 60 million galaxies based on their shape, which is easy for human brains but notoriously difficult for computers. In the first incarnation of the program, which launched in July 2007, the images were taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, conducted from a 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico. The project now includes images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well.
Galaxy Zoo(银河动物园)希望使用者能够帮助针对超过 6000 万的星系的形状进行识别和分类，这对于计算机来说很难，但是对于人类大脑来说却很容易。该项目第一阶段发布于2007年7月，图像取自  Sloan Digital Sky Survey(斯隆数字巡天)系统，从一个装在美国新墨西哥州的2.5米望远镜上拍摄。该项目现在也包括了来自 Hubble Space Telescope(哈勃太空望远镜)的图像。

Galaxy Zoo has resulted in about 14 published scientific papers examining the directions in which spiral galaxies spin, the relationship between galaxy shape and color, galaxy mergers and a bizarre, surprising object called Hanny’s Voorwerp.
Galaxy Zoo(银河动物园)已经公开发表了 14 篇科研论文，内容涉及旋转的螺旋星系、星系之间的形状和颜色、星系合并，以及一个令人惊讶的名叫 Hanny’s Voorwerp 的奇怪的对象。

Moon Zoo follows the same idea: Use human eyes to do what computers can’t. It lets users count craters in images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Moon Zoo(月球动物园)有着同样的想法：利用人民的肉眼来做计算机做不了的事情。该项目采用美国宇航局的Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(月球勘测轨道器)拍到的大约 7 万张高清图片，这些图片的清晰度小于 50 厘米。科学家要求参与该计划的公众(自称 Zooites)给陨石坑、卵石、熔岩渠道等分类，然后把月球勘测轨道器最近拍到的图片，与其他飞船在几年前拍到的图片进行对比。他们的第一项任务是清点陨石坑和卵石的数量。通过把月球不同区域和地球、火星等其他地方的这些特征进行对比及分析，Zooites 可以帮助科学家更好地了解我们太阳系的自然史。