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Microsoft want you to help research Mars

NASA wants you to do its busywork. But NASA's busywork is just about the coolest out there.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Microsoft partnered up to create a Web site that, through crowdsourcing, will help NASA research Mars. On the "Be a Martian" site, anyone can play two simple games to give NASA valuable data about Mars' landscape.
Plus, there's a ton of fascinating videos, photos, forums and other information about Mars and the satellites, probes and rovers NASA has sent there.
"We really need the next generation of explorers," Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at the JPL, said in a Microsoft announcement. "And we're also accomplishing something important for NASA. There's so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important."
Crowdsourcing is a relatively new phenomenon that harnesses the power of the Web to collect data via the masses. It's already at work in Google Maps, for example – GPS-enabled devices can sense how fast a person is driving and send that data to Google, which synthesizes it and data from thousands of other devices into real-time traffic information.
Microsoft pointed to a successful crowdsourcing project from Oxford University, which used public input to build a database called "Galaxy Zoo." Because of crowdsourcing, Oxford researchers were able to cut a job that normally takes two years down to four months.
On the NASA site, crowdsourcing is part of two games. One asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude.
To liven things up, NASA and Microsoft included a points and rewards system.
The "Be a Martian" site incorporates Microsoft Silverlight technology for the games and high-definition video. There are videos about some of NASA's more exciting Mars missions and mini-documentaries about Mars.
There's also a forum at which people can ask questions about Mars, vote for their favorite questions, and eventually receive responses (to the best questions) from NASA experts. The site also features a Mars atlas that is simpler but less impressive than the Mars section of Google Earth, but includes a bunch of information from NASA.

Under the site's hood is Windows Azure, the Web-based cloud-computing platform Microsoft discussed at length Tuesday at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles (video).

Instead of running on internal NASA computer servers, everything is hosted at Microsoft data centers – the application, storage, databases, et cetera. By using the Azure platform, the site can keep up during periods of high traffic by increasing the computing power it needs, and scale down during periods of low traffic. That way, NASA doesn't have to pay for the hardware required for high-traffic periods when much of the time it isn't needed.
"Running applications based on the Windows Azure platform through cloud services provides the ability to scale to any level," said Marc Mercuri, director of business innovation for Microsoft's Developer Platform Evangelism group. "The system dedicates an appropriate amount of processors to the application, whether it's being used by 250, 250,000 or 2,500,000 people at the same time."
All of the Mars images – hundreds of thousands of them – are hosted in a public Microsoft dataset server codenamed "Dallas," which the company revealed Tuesday at PDC. Part of Microsoft Pinpoint, Dallas gives people access to data they can use for experiments or in innovative applications.
More information on Dallas is here, and more information on Azure is here.
Using this "citizen science," NASA hopes to learn – and hopes the public learns – a wealth of new information about the Red Planet. After all, it worked beautifully in Oxford's Galaxy Zoo; with it, users found a previously undiscovered celestial body.
"We know there were photographs snapped of a landslide in progress on Mars that scientists discovered serendipitously," said Tim Harris, product manager for Microsoft's DPE group. "We hope many more people can be involved in that kind of exciting discovery."