Eager to help Planetary Resources look for asteroids and bring humanity that much closer to space mining? Well, it's time to get cracking. The company has launched Asteroid Zoo, a site that relies on crowdsourcing (i.e. you) to both find rocks in the void and train computers to do the same. It's pretty straightforward -- all you do is look at image sets from the Catalina Sky Survey and mark any asteroids or artifacts.
Be prepared to spend a lot of time sifting through pictures before you hit the motherlode. As Planetary Resources explains in the clip below, there are "hundreds of thousands" of previously unseen images; you'll probably be staring at quite a few unidentifiable blobs. You may not want to spend hours at a time on Android Zoo as a result, but it may be worth a quick trip during your lunch break. And hey, you may get lucky. You might just spot a mineral-rich asteroid, or even help NASA make an important discovery.
[Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech]
Filed under: Science, Internet
Source: Asteroid Zoo, Planetary Resources
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