ESA, together with Zooniverse, a platform for crowdsourcing in scientific research, has launched a project to
Rosetta orbits Comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko for more than two years.The spacecraft approached the comet during its approach to the Sun and continued to study it after passing "perihelion", the point of closest approach. As a result of the mission, ESA obtained a large number of images of the object, which was exposed to various effects of solar radiation.
Volunteers on the Zooniverse platform are invited toview images of the same region taken at different points in time and identify different changes. This may be large-scale dust transfer, destruction or movement of comet fragments.
The scientists note that images taken by Rosetta have already been published in the public domain in the archives, but many of them have not yet been analyzed for changes on the surface of the comet.
“Because of the complexity of imaging, the human eyedetects small differences between images better than automated algorithms,” explains Shandor Kruk, a researcher at the Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics. Max Planck, co-author of the project. "Given the excitement that Rosetta has caused during her mission, we hope that many members of the public will join this project to help scientists analyze the data."
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