DailyDirt: Space Explorers Need Your Help...
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
We've mentioned a few DIY space projects before where nearly anyone can participate in an effort to expand our knowledge of our solar system or to develop a cheaper way to get into space. More and more space exploration seems to rely on the help of a growing ecosystem of space geeks who can volunteer their time/resources to learn more about the universe around us. Here are just a few other crowdfunding or crowdsourcing efforts to explore space.- Lunar Mission One is an ambitious Kickstarter project to send a probe to the moon and drill deep down below the surface in order to get a more complete picture of the moon's composition. This project also includes a "time capsule" mission so backers can send up information (and maybe hair/DNA samples?) to the moon for posterity. [url]
- In case you missed it, NASA open sourced the code for Apollo 11 -- and actually, all of the software NASA writes is open. A catalog of NASA's software is available for budding space scientists, but it's not just for space nerds -- some biologists adapted the Hubble Space Telescope's star-mapping algorithm to track endangered whales -- and presumably there are other gems just waiting to be adapted to other good uses. [url]
- NASA is looking for anyone with good suggestions on how to do something more productive with the "dead mass" that is typically ejected during the descent phase of a probe. The Mars Balance Challenge wants to know what you'd do with 150kg of mass that would be ejected at different times prior to landing a probe on Mars. [url]
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Filed Under: apollo, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, diy space, lunar mission one, nasa software, space, space exploration
Companies: innocentive, kickstarter, nasa
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Not just Open Source...
...but in the Public Domain. "A work prepared by an officer or employee" of the federal government "as part of that person's official duties," under section 105 of the Copyright Act, is not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law, placing it in the public domain. So all code written by Federal employees as part of their job is in the public domain, even better than Open Source.Subscribe: RSS
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Dead Mass
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Not just Open Source...
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