Our satellite hits the road-- even before it gets built!  I will be presenting a short talk on "Project Calliope: Science and Social Media" at the winter AAS meeting in Washington DC on January 7, 2010.  The session is 'Innovations in Teaching and Learning'.

     We present the 'Project Calliope' picosatellite to explore how to use social media to initiate, fund, and engage in scientific research. 'Project Calliope' is a sonified ionospheric detector being launched in 2010 on the "TubeSat" platform. It has no federal or academic contribution, and relies on 'citizen scientists' and such 'citizen journalist' channels as ScientificBlogging.com for its technical and infrastructure support. The fundamental question of whether good science can come from small packages has a mixed answer. We put forth the 'Science2.0' concept of science as play, provide a method for engaging individuals as contributors, discuss the pros and cons of operating a research project with full transparency, and present preliminary K12 outreach results.

The AAS abstracts for the full session are now online.  We're in good company-- other talks include topics we're also covered here on SB: 'Hands-on Space Exploration through High Altitude Ballooning' and 'December the Twentieth (2012) Is Too Late: Addressing the "Science" of Doomsday'.

Alex

Track The Satellite Diaries via RSS feed and Twitter @skyday  (or go slumming in my main column, the Daytime Astronomer)