You may have read about this in one of Karri Ferron’s blog posts two weeks ago: our sister publication,
Discover, conducted a contest that will allow a winner to win funding for his or her own space experiment! The contest is now closed, but I’ve been asked to help judge the winner by
Discover’s Editor-in-Chief Corey Powell and Contributing Editor (and Science Cheerleader) Darlene Cavalier.
Let me repeat part of Karri‘s last post here:
NanoSatisfi, a company of aerospace experts working to democratize space access, is running a KickStarter campaign to fund such a satellite named ArduSat. The public will be able to rent time on this small satellite and use the device for whatever it pleases — from science experiments to pictures on-demand of Earth, the Moon, and the stars — courtesy of its Arduino processor.
The Discover Astronomy Space Challenge will give away a development kit worth $1,500 to the Kickstarter donor (of any amount of money). The kit includes Arduinos and an advanced sensor suite shipped to your home address, as well as one week of up-time on the satellite to run any experiment. You’ll be able to build the experiment yourself and have it sent up on ArduSat when it takes to the sky.
The staff at Discover wanted to share this contest with Astronomy’s audience because we all know there are quite a few citizen scientists in our readership. So check out the technical details of the satellite and the guidelines for the Discover Astronomy Space Challenge.
Judging will conclude by this Wednesday, July 25. I thank Corey and Darlene for letting me be involved with this enterprise, and I’ll be excited to let you know about the results!
Stay tuned!