NASA Wants You — To Find A Missing Planet

Style Magazine Newswire | 2/17/2017, 4 p.m.
Want to work for NASA from the comforts of your couch? The space agency is looking to fulfill an amateur …
Water-ice clouds, polar ice and other geographic features can be seen in this full-disk image of Mars from 2011. NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover touched down on the planet on August 6. Take a look at stunning photographs of Mars over the years.

Want to work for NASA from the comforts of your couch? The space agency is looking to fulfill an amateur astronomer's dream — credit for the discovery of a new planet.

NASA is looking for help to find the mysterious and as-yet undiscovered Planet 9, which astronomers think may be the most distant planet in our solar system.

A new website — Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 — lets people comb through footage captured by the agency's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission a few years ago.

The footage shows objects gradually moving across the sky. "There are too many images for us to search through by ourselves," NASA said.

In this case, people are better than computers at spotting and identifying objects, such as a planet, in the footage. Human eyes can easily recognize the important moving objects while ignoring the background stars and other objects that computer programs would flag.

Astronomers believe the planet exists because of strange orbits of other distant objects that spin beyond Neptune. If Planet 9 — also known as Planet X — is there and is as bright as some predictions, it could show up in the WISE movies taken in 2010 and 2011.

This "has the potential to unlock once-in-a-century discoveries, and it's exciting to think they could be spotted first by a citizen scientist," said Aaron Meisner, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in analyzing WISE images.

For more information go to http://www.khou.com

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