MoonMappers Logo with LRO

If you poked around the site today, you may have noticed that every once in a while everything went all crazy. Around the programming team we call this “breaking the universe” or “going all Picasso.” Normally this happens when someone editing the code makes a mistake. Today the reasons were much more interesting – we migrated from our beta server to a permanent, production server.

Today, March 19, 2012, we stripped off our beta label.

Here at CosmoQuest, we believe in doing everything out in the open. We want you to be part of the process, and to be part of defining what we do. This means, we’ll launch things in beta as soon as they’re at the “mostly working, minimum functionality” stage of things. And then, for days, weeks, or months, we’ll linger under the BETA label as we add in the things you and our science teams ask for. We don’t plan to stretch things for years, the way Google Labs so often does, but…

But for our main content areas and for MoonMappers, the beta period is now over. We’ll continue to add features, add data, and listen to your wants. (And we’ll continue to fix any bugs we missed or added!), but we hope to be a bit less buggy about it.

Tomorrow morning, we’ll be sending out a press release announcing MoonMappers to the world. The video in this blog post (below) will be part of that press release.

While we’re hoping the press will go gangbusters promoting our projects and your hard work, we know they can only communicate things so well. No one really knows these pages as well as those of you who dedicate your time to making science and science learning happen here at CosmoQuest. The best way to get people to understand this site is for you to share what CosmoQuest is to you.

Will you help? Will you go to your blog, your Facebook, your Twitter, your Google plus, and all your other social sharing accounts and help get the word out? Will you tell people about the Star Party you watched? Will you share with others those craters you explored on the Moon? Will you tell people how they can come here and learn and do science?

It’s a bit scary standing here, naked without our beta label, but the time has come to stop hiding.

We’re proud of what we’ve done, and we are hoping you’ll join us in proclaiming, “Together, we are CosmoQuest.”