Planet Patrol: The Hunt for New Worlds

[bystander]

Search for New Worlds at Home with NASA’s Planet Patrol Project
NASA | GSFC | Planet Patrol | 2020 Sep 30

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Planet Patrol ~ Credit: NASA/GSFC/CI Lab

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Help NASA find exoplanets, worlds beyond our solar system, through a newly launched website called Planet Patrol. This citizen science platform allows members of the public to collaborate with professional astronomers as they sort through a stockpile of star-studded images collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

“Automated methods of processing TESS data sometimes fail to catch imposters that look like exoplanets,” said project leader Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “The human eye is extremely good at spotting such imposters, and we need citizen scientists to help us distinguish between the look-alikes and genuine planets.”

Volunteers will help determine which TESS snapshots include signals from potential planets and which ones show planet impersonators. ...

[Forrest White]

Goddard's summer intern recently helped discover the first planet of the TESS mission, orbiting two stars, as part of another civilian science program called Planet Hunters TESS.