Armchair stargazers prove success isn’t rocket science

As students filter back into classrooms and universities this fall, the older generation talks about educating and guiding the brilliant minds of tomorrow. They have high hopes of producing doctors, astronauts, robotics experts and neurologists.

But you don't have to be a super genius to make a significant scientific contribution. A Dutch elementary school teacher proved this in 2007 when she discovered a new space phenomenon — a greenish gas cloud in a photo on the Internet classification project Galaxy Zoo.

Galaxy Zoo is a joint project between several major universities around the world, including Johns Hopkins and Oxford. The goal of the project is similar to the goals of a project called SETI@home, which uses a program that runs in the background to download and analyze radio wave signals from the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence system.

This and other programs, called distributed computing programs, allow average citizens to make a contribution by using surplus computer processing power to help run equations and crunch numbers for scientific projects that simply cannot be solved on one computer. Once the program is running, users do not have to do anything but sit back and bask in the glory of their contribution to the modern age.

In contrast, projects like Galaxy Zoo require human interaction — people who can find patterns in photos of galaxies that even the most advanced computers cannot analyze. Any day, at any moment, any individual with access to the Internet may log on, complete the simple tutorial, and take a look at any one of the millions of images of galaxies that possibly no one else has ever seen before.

Galaxy Zoo is not the first project to use the incredible power of amateur scientists on the Internet. Before it, there was a project called Stardust@home. This project used interactive stacked photographs that were collected by a microscope to allow average people to examine large tracts of aerogel from the Stardust spacecraft, which returned to earth in January of 2006.

Thousands of volunteers called “dusters” pored over the images to locate approximately 50 interstellar dust particle candidates in the aerogel. The lucky discoverers did not go unrewarded. Each volunteer that revealed an actual interstellar dust particle was given the honor of naming it.

The project was later divided into two phases, with the second phase using images whose resolution was double that of the images used in the original Stardust@home project. This allowed volunteers to search with far more accuracy and certainty.

As of July 31, 2008, six particles out of the 50 interstellar candidates had been verified as non-interstellar. The good news is that project managers have perfected their verification techniques, and the program is now calling for volunteers to reexamine the images and help discover particle tracks that may have been missed the first time.

The thousands of people who have participated in these and similar projects are every bit as important as the men and women wearing white coats in sterile rooms, and maybe even more so. They prove that you don't have to be anything extraordinary to make a difference — you just need to have a desire to help.