wired.com wrote:
Over the past 15 years, astronomers have found just 136 planets outside our solar system. But now space buffs David Gutelius and Laurance Doyle say they can push that number well into the thousands by 2010.
They just need to borrow your computer for a little while.
The two entrepreneurs are currently seeking funding for a nonprofit project that would turn the home computers of every amateur astronomer in the world into one giant calculator, capable of crunching through millions of bits of cosmic data each day.
Their hope is that a number of computers in the PlanetQuest Collaboratory, as the network is being called, will quickly stumble across the mathematical signatures of planets just like Earth. And that's when Gutelius and Doyle will return the favor, by letting the computers' owners decide what to name whatever they find.
"This is public science," said Gutelius, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and executive director of the PlanetQuest project. "We estimate that somewhere between one in 3,000 and one in 5,000 people will find a planet. Those are pretty damn good odds."
PlanetQuest developers are currently preparing to test the Collaboratory software for the first time. It will work like this: Volunteers will install the software on their computers, at which point it will automatically download packets of data from the PlanetQuest database. The data will be compiled from images of stars taken by telescopes around the planet.
The Collaboratory program will analyze the images for slight variations that indicate that the shadow of a planet has passed in front of a star. When one set of data is complete, the software downloads a new set and starts over.
If it sounds a lot like SETI@Home, the University of California at Berkeley project that uses volunteer computing power to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, that's because it is. Doyle, who serves as PlanetQuest's president, is an astrophysicist with the SETI Institute in California. And the software for the Collaboratory is being built with BOINC, the same open-source platform used by SETI@Home and other distributed computing projects.
But the project has differences, too. Perhaps the biggest is that PlanetQuest will analyze data from as many as 10 dedicated telescopes around the world -- provided the project's backers can raise the roughly $3.5 million needed to build each one. PlanetQuest will also use data from a soon-to-be-refurbished telescope at the Lick Observatory in California. SETI@Home is designed to analyze data only from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, which is used for many different reasons.
Another difference is that Gutelius and Doyle want the Collaboratory to be much more interactive than other distributed science software, which often just runs in the background on a person's computer. For instance, volunteers will be able to call up information about the stars currently being scanned by their computers.
"This is no SETI@Home screensaver," said Gutelius. "We've seen a raft of reports saying U.S. schools are lagging far behind our peers in the developed world in math and science, so we feel really strongly that PlanetQuest try to address that issue."
Gutelius estimates that the total startup costs for PlanetQuest will run in the order of $20 million dollars. Operating costs per year would be approximately $10 million. That's nothing compared to the cost of a major NASA program, said Gutelius. For instance, NASA's Kepler mission, which will scan 100,000 stars for signs of planets, will cost nearly $300 million.
"The point is to not have this be another multimillion-dollar project that burns out," said Gutelius. "All these NASA missions, after a finite time they're gone -- that's it. But we'll keep going."
And, he said, it doesn't require taxpayers to foot the bill. The nonprofit PlanetQuest will seek funding from private investors and donors. Jeremy Crandell1, co-founder of antispam firm Brightmail, is a major investor in PlanetQuest. The project's executives also hope to sustain further development by selling access to premium content and serving ads on the PlanetQuest website.
Gutelius said he expects a beta version of the Collaboratory software to be available before the end of the year.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
I don't think we'll be naming any planets, but getting co-credit, yeah. That'd be cool. It's like the guy whose computer found the world's largest prime number (remember that?). Whoever's computer finds alien signals will get co-credit for discovery, too. Here's your chance for fifteen minutes of fame, folks!
Damn, there are just too many distributed computing projects to choose from! AAARGH!
DPDarkPrimus is my boyfriend!
SDNW4 Nation: The Refuge And, on Nova Terra, Al-Stan the Totally and Completely Honest and Legitimate Weapons Dealer and Used Starship Salesman slept on a bed made of money, with a blaster under his pillow and his sombrero pulled over his face. This is to say, he slept very well indeed.
"Ha ha! Yes, Mark Evans is back, suckers, and he's the key to everything! He's the Half Blood Prince, he's Harry's Great-Aunt, he's the Heir of Gryffindor, he lives up the Pillar of Storgé and he owns the Mystic Kettle of Nackledirk!" - J.K. Rowling
***
"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on
the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your
hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."
Montcalm wrote:There will be Coruscent,Tatooine,Hoth etc
Every SW fans will jump in the naming
Why would you waste a possible once-in-a-lifetime event on names like that? I'm sure most of them will either be named after the astronomer that found it, or a person he or she has some irrational crush on.
"That's the planet "Bob Peterson is Awesome". It's in the "Demi Moore System". Now, maybe she'll answer one of the twenty fan letters I send her every week..."
Montcalm wrote:There will be Coruscent,Tatooine,Hoth etc
Every SW fans will jump in the naming
Why would you waste a possible once-in-a-lifetime event on names like that? I'm sure most of them will either be named after the astronomer that found it, or a person he or she has some irrational crush on.
"That's the planet "Bob Peterson is Awesome". It's in the "Demi Moore System". Now, maybe she'll answer one of the twenty fan letters I send her every week..."
I'm apt to take the claim that those involved in the planet-hunting project will be able to name their finds with a few Jupiter-masses of salt. If memory serves, the ultimate go-ahead for the naming of various celestial bodies lies with the IAU, who will, at some point, without a doubt, come up with a scheme for naming extrasolar planets which will completely ignore whatever names are generated by this pie-in-the-sky project.
Chardok wrote:I envision an LV-426, Vulcan, Fuck You, Pizza, 42, etc. etc. etc.
There is already a planet named Vulcan.
"Ha ha! Yes, Mark Evans is back, suckers, and he's the key to everything! He's the Half Blood Prince, he's Harry's Great-Aunt, he's the Heir of Gryffindor, he lives up the Pillar of Storgé and he owns the Mystic Kettle of Nackledirk!" - J.K. Rowling
***
"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on
the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your
hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."
