Vendredi 29 Mars 2024
taille du texte
   
Mercredi, 14 Décembre 2011 00:43

Count Meteoroids for NASA With Your iPhone

Rate this item
(0 Votes)

Count Meteoroids for NASA With Your iPhone

If you’re planning to watch the Geminid meteor shower (which peaks tonight), consider helping out NASA’s meteor researchers.

NASA’s new Meteor Counter is a free app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch that uses citizen scientists to discover new meteor showers, pinpoint comet debris streams and map the distribution of meteoroids around Earth’s orbit.

Every time you see a shooting star streak across the sky, you simply click a key corresponding to how bright you estimate it was. Each keytap records valuable information about time and location of meteors, as well as their magnitude, which later gets uploaded to NASA’s servers.

An optional voice recorder allows you to add annotations of each event. Experts can add a specific origin and trajectory of the shooting star while novices might settle for a simple “Cool!”

Image: Jimmy Westlake/NASA

Count Meteoroids for NASA With Your iPhoneAdam is a Wired Science reporter and freelance journalist. He lives in Oakland, Ca near a lake and enjoys space, physics, and other sciency things.
Follow @adamspacemann on Twitter.

Authors:

French (Fr)English (United Kingdom)

Parmi nos clients

mobileporn