Planetary Resources wants your help spotting asteroids
Eager to help Planetary Resources look for asteroids and bring humanity that much closer to space mining? Well, it's time to get cracking. The company has launched Asteroid Zoo, a site that relies on crowdsourcing (i.e. you) to both find rocks in the void and train computers to do the same. It's pretty straightforward -- all you do is look at image sets from the Catalina Sky Survey and mark any asteroids or artifacts.
Be prepared to spend a lot of time sifting through pictures before you hit the motherlode. As Planetary Resources explains in the clip below, there are "hundreds of thousands" of previously unseen images; you'll probably be staring at quite a few unidentifiable blobs. You may not want to spend hours at a time on Android Zoo as a result, but it may be worth a quick trip during your lunch break. And hey, you may get lucky. You might just spot a mineral-rich asteroid, or even help NASA make an important discovery.
[Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech]
