NASA Seeks Citizen Scientists With iPhones To Help Track Meteors

Hey kids, NASA needs your help. And your iPhone.

It turns out there’s more space-stuff raining down on Earth than you might think. About 40 tons every day, in fact. Tracking it all is nigh impossible, but you could help out by tracking just a fraction of it.

To do that, you’ll need NASA’s free Meteor Counter app for iPhone. The phone itself does a lot of the work automatically – it knows where you are and what the time is. All you have to do is tap a chart to describe the brightness of every meteor you spot.

Here’s a video with more info:

With a few thousand iPhones running this app all over the world, NASA gets itself a low-cost international meteor monitoring system for peanuts. And you get a good excuse for lying on your back and looking up at the night sky.

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