The NASA Harp project
NASA are looking for human volunteers to assist with spectographic analysis. Along the way you listen to the music of the spheres...
What is space made of? It's definitely not a perfect vacuum... It's filled with charged particles, electrons and ions.
These particles stream out from the Sun, making up the solar wind (left). When the particles approach Earth, our planet's magnetic force field mostly pushes them out of the way. But our magnetic shield isn't perfect or static, it's always changing in wave-like motions (right).
Different types of space waves are analogous to vibrations in air made by musical instruments, like a drum head, flute, or guitar string, with each occuring in specific regions around Earth (picture at left adapted from Zong et al., 2008). The motion of invisible charged particles and their accompanying electromagnetic fields can be converted to sound, known as audification. The first goal of the HARP project is to analyze ultra-low frequency (ULF) waves, which travel like standing waves along a harp string.
Using magnetic field measurements from NASA's THEMIS-ARTEMIS satellites (right), the data are unmodified except for being sped up using a computer algorithm so that the vibrations are brought within the range of human hearing. Thus a day of data is compressed into about 4 seconds. In the future, we plan to expand to use data from additional satellite missions to study many different kinds of waves.
These particles stream out from the Sun, making up the solar wind (left). When the particles approach Earth, our planet's magnetic force field mostly pushes them out of the way. But our magnetic shield isn't perfect or static, it's always changing in wave-like motions (right).
Different types of space waves are analogous to vibrations in air made by musical instruments, like a drum head, flute, or guitar string, with each occuring in specific regions around Earth (picture at left adapted from Zong et al., 2008). The motion of invisible charged particles and their accompanying electromagnetic fields can be converted to sound, known as audification. The first goal of the HARP project is to analyze ultra-low frequency (ULF) waves, which travel like standing waves along a harp string.
Using magnetic field measurements from NASA's THEMIS-ARTEMIS satellites (right), the data are unmodified except for being sped up using a computer algorithm so that the vibrations are brought within the range of human hearing. Thus a day of data is compressed into about 4 seconds. In the future, we plan to expand to use data from additional satellite missions to study many different kinds of waves.
more info here...
To take part you have to register then go through some practice sessions, then you start analysing for real. There is clearly a bit of a backlog - the data is dated 2012/2013.
Algorithms...you have to love them sometimes. I watched some of the videos associated with this project, and YT's next suggestion was...Wilson, Betty and Keppel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn83cCEpZV0 and where, you may well ask, is Betty??