Help map Vesta

Saturday, September 15, 2012

An interesting and worthwhile new project has just begun - similar to Moon Zoo where users count and classify craters from images of the lunar surface, now scientists need our help with the massive amount of data from Dawn's extensive surveying of the huge asteroid / protoplanet Vesta.

The site where you can do this is:

http://cosmoquest.org/mappers/vesta/

Vesta is a fairly quaint destination, large enough that analyzing the data takes a huge amount of time and resources but still a full sixty times less surface area than the moon, approximately. For some reason there doesn't seem to be a readily-available image comparing the size of the two except for this tiny one and a few others like it:


So it will have to suffice.

The site also has a nice statistics section showing the number of images to be analyzed vs. the number and percentage done. Browsing the forums it looks like each image is analyzed by ten users before being deemed done.

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