Moon Zoo - Help identify craters on the moon

[David.Seth2]

http://www.moonzoo.org/

About Moon Zoo

The Moon is perhaps the most familiar object in the night sky, but it still has its mysteries. Following the excitement of the Apollo Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s, a new flotilla of spacecraft is exploring the Earth's nearest neighbour. The images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which you're invited to explore with Moon Zoo show the lunar surface in remarkable detail, including features as small as 50 cm (about one and a half feet) across.

LRO is a remarkable spacecraft, the product of years of hard work by an enormous team of scientists and engineers who made the mission possible. It carries, amongst other instruments, an incredible camera, LROC. LROC is actually three cameras — two Narrow Angle Cameras which supply Moon Zoo images, and a Wide Angle Camera. Data from the first six months of the mission have been released by the LROC team through the Planetary Data System (PDS), and much more is coming...
What do we want to know?

The aim of Moon Zoo is to provide detailed crater counts for as much as the Moon's surface as possible. Unlike here on Earth where weather quickly erodes any signs of all but the most recent impacts, craters on the lunar surface stay almost until eternity. That means that the number of craters on a particular piece of the surface tells us how old it is. This technique is used all over the Solar System, but the Moon is particularly important because we have ground truth — samples brought back by the Apollo missions — which allow us to calibrate our estimates. Planetary scientists have always carried out this kind of analysis on large scales, but with your help and the fabulous LRO images then we should be able to uncover the finer details of the Moon's history.

Craters can tell us more than just the history of the lunar surface though. In particular, you're asked in Moon Zoo to look for craters with boulders around the rim. Boulders are a sign that the impact was powerful enough that it excavated rock from beneath the regolith (the lunar 'soil') and so by keeping an eye out for these we can begin to map the depth of the regolith across the surface of the Moon.

Of course, in exploring the lunar surface who knows what else you might find. We very much hope that Moon Zoo will lead to the discovery of many unusual features — so please dive in and enjoy a view of the Moon that even Apollo astronauts would enjoy.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127072804

Enter Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott. He's asking amateur astronomers to help review, measure and classify tens of thousands of moon photos streaming to Earth. He has set up the website MoonZoo.org, where anyone can log on, get trained and become a space explorer.

"We need anybody and everybody," Lintott tells NPR's Guy Raz on Weekend All Things Considered.

For example, "we ask people to count the craters that they can see ... and that tells us all sorts of things about the history and the age of that bit of surface," Lintott explains.

Just joined today after hearing about it on the news. Its actually kind of fun and in a way, I'm helping map out the moon. Sign up and give it a try. Its funny how the moon is the closest foreign object to the earth and yet we still don't know much about it.

 

[Danimal]

I read that article and thought "lol @ people still using Imperial" and now I move on.

 

[Warped]

cool idea, just wish i had more time for it

 

[Remus]

Help identify craters on the moon

Sounds THRILLING!

 

[DEATH eVADER]

I read that article and thought "lol @ people still using Imperial" and now I move on.

Imperial, pft

I still use Cubits

 

[VirusType2]

I prefer to measure things in terms of beans, with my bean counter.

Inaccurate to be sure, but tastier than a ruler.

 

[Danimal]

 

[FISHY CRACKERS]

I'm not going to bother reading, i'm just going to assume from the title this is about space cows. This being the case, carry on.

 

[KiplingsCat]

We're whalers on the moon
We carry our harpoons
But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing a whaling tune!