Welcome to our blog. This is a new project and as we work to make it come to life we’re going to document our successes, failures, and coding discoveries here on this blog. Along the way we’ll share who we are and and what we’re hoping to do.

Once launched, CosmoQuest will be a site that allows you to map other worlds, explore our universe, and contribute to science. Literally, map other worlds. Data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Dawn, MESSENGER, and the Hubble Space Telescope will populate a series of citizen science projects designed to get you helping us map surface features and investigate the environments around planets.

For now, our focus is just on getting things up and running and ready for you to play. Toward that end, we’re launching this blog and a variety of social media. Poke around, click on things, and tell us what you’d like to see.

Oh… and before you ask – That X? It really is “X marks the spot.” We’re working to transform hard drives of unknowns (Those pesky “here be dragons”) into an understood universe. We expect a lot of scientific treasure is going to be found along the way. You can also think of it as solving for the value of X, and probably many other symbolic things we haven’t thought of. (And all that lofty language aside, the name cosmoquest was taken just about everywhere, but cosmoquestx was still available, we are cosmoquestx.) Go X.