NASA | 'Disk Detectives' Top 1 Million Classifications in Search for Planetary Habitats

A NASA-sponsored website, DiskDetective.org, lets the public discover embryonic planetary systems hidden among data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.
Last year, this site was led and funded by NASA and developed by Zooniverse which was a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop and manage the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects.
Disk Detective incorporates images from WISE and other sky surveys in the form of brief animations the website calls flip books. Volunteers view a flip book and then classify the object based on simple criteria, such as whether the image is round or includes multiple objects. By collecting this information, astronomers will be able to assess which sources should be explored in greater detail.
Today volunteers at DiskDetective.org have classified one million videos. The disk candidates they found went to telescopes in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Argentina. These findings will help further the search for paterns in disks and extrasolar planets.
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