[CAnet - news] Global Collaboratory of networks & telescopes for new planets

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[Another excellent example of Citizen Science.  A similar initiative is the
Faulkes Telescope in the UK which allows students to remotely control and
retrieve images from telescopes in Hawaii. Some excerpts from article in
Wired - BSA]

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,66757,00.html?tw=wn_story_mailer


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.

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.

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. PlanetQuest will also use data from a soon-to-be-refurbished
telescope at the Lick Observatory in California.




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