Citizen Science: Will NASA Lead or Fall Behind?

Excellent to see this coming out from Einstein@home. I will happily point out that NASA has funded expansions of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project (public outreach, IT infrastructure generalization, Facebook apps for galaxy classification) as well as spinoff science from the project through HST, GALEX, and XMM - so at some level NASA is keeping up. Sibling projects under the Zooniverse banner have participants sifting through LRO and STEREO imagery, and MESSENGER is on the schedule as its orbital imagery is released to the PDS.

"Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 and an International Year of Astronomy 2009 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations."

Hey there's nothing wrong with distributed computing discoveries coming from non-NASA "organizers". If they have a ton of data to sift through from various telescopes then I'm all for it. In fact NASA could start up their own distributed computing program like SETI@Home and they could pass into it whatever data needs to be crunched. They could delegate its time to different things similar to how they do for telescopes themselves. How about NASADiscovery@Home? I imagine setting up each run would take a lot of work but it can really get results as we've seen. It probably wouldn't have trouble getting volunteer computers.

Distributed computing is a great way for the public to plug into scientific research. I've been donating processor cycles for quite some time and its really cool to be able to participate in the vast array of computing projects available. I even water cooled my computer to amp it up a bit.

Lots o' fun and you get the chance to learn the specifics of each project and the science behind it. Also you may get the chance to personally discover a pulsar. How cool is that?

hikingmike commented on a NASA sponsored BOINC project:

"It probably wouldn't have trouble getting volunteer computers"

Oh I can see it now - it would be "strongly suggested" that contractor employees participate - heck - they might even tract participation on a bulletin board in the hallway, just like they do other NASA blessed community programs.

I hadn't thought of it before, but there might be just as much benefit to these distributed computing projects (seti, folding) in getting the public interested in science, as the actual computing power.