CosmoQuest has a large presence at this year’s AGU in Washington, DC, from Dec 10-14, 2018. We have a number of posters and presentations by our team members. If you’re there, come by and check out what we’ve been doing!

Carina Bennett from University of Arizona will be presenting the poster P33C-3848: Hazard Identification Using CosmoQuest Citizen Science for the OSIRIS-REx Mission

When: Wednesday, 12 December 2018 13:40 – 18:00
Where: Walter E Washington Convention Center – Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Description: The OSIRIS-REx mission is planned to begin proximity operations at the asteroid (101955) Bennu in December 2018. To identify candidate sample sites and ensure spacecraft safety, the mission team must identify hazards, including craters and boulders >21cm, for 80% of the surface. To achieve this, the Image Processing Working Group is collaborating with the virtual research facility CosmoQuest to design a citizen science-based project that facilitates crowd-sourced hazard identification. Development of this project consisted of a Bennu Mappers webpage built on the CosmoQuest Citizen Science Builder Software. This included new hazard identification tools unique to the Bennu Mappers application, a tutorial, and updates to the clustering algorithm that aggregates multiple users’ counts into single feature identifications.
In preparation for active mission work we have tested the Bennu Mappers tool using image data from several small bodies, including a) (25143) Itokawa from JAXA’s Hayabusa mission; b) Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from ESA’s Rosetta mission; and c) simulated image mosaics of Bennu. We recently completed an end-to-end test of the application during the Workshop in Geology and Geophysics of the Solar System summer school in Petnica, Serbia.

We present an overview of the new Bennu Mappers tool as well as results from recently completed end-to-end tests.