Photo credit: Nanosatisfi.com
You may have heard a couple weeks ago that
Discover and
Astronomy magazines participated in a contest in conjunction with the Ardusat project. I participated as one of the judges and am delighted to say that Enrique Gomez is the winner; he will receive a development kit worth $1,500 and one week of uptime on the Ardusat satellite to examine gamma-ray flashes that originate from thunderstorms on Earth. Using Ardusat’s Geiger counter, Gomez will create a simple coincidence particle detector. He is passionate about space exploration and citizen science.
In Gomez’s words, “I believe all science is a ‘social science’ in that we advance questions about nature as a community. Space science should be no exception. When I read in KickStarter about ArduSat, I knew I had to support it because it speaks to me about this belief. ArduSat is a prime example of two ideas that are worth sharing widely. The first is community-supported science. People care about scientific and technological problems, and thus, they can gather their resources to answer them. The second is citizen science. People can not only ask scientific questions but can also work together as a community to answer them irrespective of their scientific or technical background. This is also where the open source spirit of Arduino technology comes into play by making even the technical dimension of a scientific project as accessible as possible. The project that I proposed came from my fascination with sky phenomena. There are so many mysteries in the Earth’s atmosphere between the troposphere and the ionosphere, which beg for inquisitive minds. To quote Carl Sagan: ‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.’ The best way to experience a discovery is to share it with others.”
Congratulations, Enrique!
For more on the Ardusat project and more, see the project’s website at
www.nanosatisfi.com.
You can still make a contribution to citizen science here, and it will help the world and the base of scientific knowledge in a big way.
Cheers.