Planet Hunters 2 is part of the Zooniverse—a collection of citizen science projects that utilize the power of the crowd to solve big data problems for scientists. Planet Hunters is one of the first projects of the Zooniverse, with the original launching in 2010. At the time, the goal was to enable anyone to be able to search data from the NASA Kepler spacecraft for the characteristic drop in light due to an orbiting extrasolar planets crossing in front of their parent stars. This kind of data it two complex for computers to identify, so the Zooniverse put the task out for our users. Nearly 300,00 users looked at the data resulting on the discovery of several confirmed planets.
This new version, Planet Hunters 2, aims to utilize data from the Kepler 2 (K2) spacecraft. The design challenge for this new iteration was to making identifying these transits easier. This is done by changing the way in which users interact with this complex graph of data.
Want to help find an exoplanet? Give the live site a try!
The primary classification interface
The progression of white dots in the graph (above) represent the amount of light given off by a distant start over the course of 30 days. Like a fire, the amount of light produced over time will fluctuate but generally remain constant. What scientists and users are looking for is dip—this indicates a transit. This occurs when an exoplant passes in front of a star during its orbit causing the observed amount of light appear as a dip in the graph.
These dips in data can be quite subtle, so the graph users interact with has tools allowing them to expand the data and look for transits more closely. If a possible transit is discovered it can be quickly and easily marked by highlighting it in the graph.
The PH2 Minicourse educates users to imrove their observation skills
Post-classification summary
