Crowdsourced ‘Crater Counting’ as Good as the Pros

Amateurs counting the craters seen on photos of
the moon taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are as
accurate, in the aggregate, as any professional crater counter,
according to a study by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The
study relied on CosmoQuest, an Internet project that marshals
volunteers to assist in some of the more mundane tasks of National
Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) space missions.

CosmoQuest is a program
created in part by the Center for Science Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) at Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville that aims “to build a series of projects
that map the surfaces of rocky worlds and explore the atmospheres
of planets and small bodies the solar system over.”

Researchers at Colorado University appear excited at the
evidence they’ve gathered of crowdsourcing’s efficacy. Via a
university press
release:

“The new research points out that crowdsourcing is a
viable way to do planetary science,” said Research Scientist Stuart
Robbins of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space
Physics, who led the study. The study compared the results of eight
professional planetary crater counters with several thousand
amateur crater counters from every corner of the globe.

“What we can say is that a very large group of volunteers was able
to chart these features on the moon just as well as professional
researchers,” Robbins said. “More importantly, we now have evidence
that we can use the power of crowdsourcing to gather more reliable
data from the moon than we ever thought was possible
before.”

The results may be exciting, but they shouldn’t be surprising.
Crowdsourcing has been an effective data-processing and gathering
tool for some time. It can be used to
solve social problems,
raise start-up funds, and even to
write policy and
try to find missing planes.

Crowdsourcing has also been used in both science and astronomy
as well. SETI Live, for example, a project by the Search for
Extraterrestrial Life (SETI), launched two years ago; the
program crowdsources the
search for extraterrestrial life.

SETI@home,
meanwhile, has been in operation since 1999; it crowdsources to
acquire the computer power needed to analyze radio signals and
other scientific measurements that could provide clues about the
presence of extraterrestrial life. Even CosmoQuest isn’t new. It
launched in 2011, and the beta for the Moon Mapper program, which
crowdsources the crater counting, launched in 2012.