Essay Sample about Disk Detective
Disk Detective is a program where people examine pictures sent by NASA in order to help astronomers find disk candidates. The goal of the program is to try and find new disk where planets may be able to form. A disk are disk shaped clouds of gas, dust, and pieces of rocks. People get images from four different astronomical surveys which are the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, the Pan-STARRS survey, the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), and the data from the unWISE. People have to look at images from these four to determine if an image is good enough to be a disk contender. The version right now is actually Disk Detective 2.0. The first version called Disk Detective 1.0 was a huge success as it discovered a new type of disk called the Peter Pan Disks.
The main organizers of the project is NASA itself. They obtain the pictures in space and are the ones that share the images with the people. The people then look through the images and decide if they are considered a good disk candidate. Once they decided an image is good enough to be a disk candidate, NASA receives those images and then further analyzes them to see if they are disks or not. Over 30,000 have participated or volunteered in the project. Since the images are sent on a website, you can participate from all over the world. People from Argentina, Chile, The United States, and even asia have been recorded to have participated in the project. The only requirement is to have a computer so you can access the images to look at. Participants only have to look at images and decide if they are disk candidates or not. That is the only task they have to do.
The project has been around since January 30, 2014. Since then it has had two version and the current one is called Disk Detective 2.0. The first version ended around 2019 and since then we are in the current version. The first version was famous for discovering a new typ of disk called the Peter Pan Disk. They are disk that seem like they don’t grown up just like Peter Pan. The study has been strong since the start which is why it went past the expected end date of 2017 and still going strong in 2021. All the funding has come from NASA themselves. They are the ones who created the website and who put the images on it. NASA truly believes in the project which is why they are still funding it to this day. From the telescopes to uploading to the website is done by NASA and will most likely be done by NASA for the remainder of the program.
I learned that to be a scientist you have to have a lot of patience. Most of the time I was looking at similar images that were not close to being disk candidates. I looked at over a hundred images during the project and found about 3 or 4 that were close to being disk candidates. Scientist have to look at about a thousand images per day and I would not be able to that. The amount of patience that they must have is way to much for me to comprehend. Overall it became very repetitive as I was doing the same thing over and over again. For what I would change is not much. Having better image qualities could help the program out as there was time where I couldn’t tell if the image contained a dot or not and had to look real close at it. Then again the telescopes they use is most likely their best so the chance of better image quality is minor as it is taking the images from far away. That is the only problem I have and there is not to much to add or fix about the whole program. It was fine for the first couple days but I found myself bored relatively soon. It was something that I would have never done had it not been for this class. It was a new experience that I will probably never do again as my patience for these kinds of things not that good compared to other things that I enjoy do.
