HARP in Space!

This might be old news to you, but I just learned that NASA has a HARP! 

Ok, for NASA, HARP means Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas.  What?

HARPs in Space!

Loads of science-y words to say Hearing the activity of the Sun.

No, really.  The idea is to capture data from the sun and the plasma it puts out, and then listen to it to find patterns.  Patterns that would be harder (or impossible) to find visually.  Or by a computer algorithm. 

The sounds represent the same thing as you see as the Aurora Borealis – how cool is that?! 

As musicians we know all about patterns in sound.  Sound patterns are our stock in trade!  And NASA is inviting you to participate to help explore the data!

This is one of a number of NASA projects open to Citizen Scientists to help them analyze data.  Data is something they have tons of so they need help getting it all poked at.  They provide the open-source tool with which you can poke at (and possibly reveal) what’s hiding in the data from space.  They point out that it’s like using sonar to see the ocean.  They’ll even train you to find stuff so you can identify what they are looking for.  You could find something no one else has identified – again, how cool is that?

Would you like to be a NASA citizen scientist and participate in the HARP project?  If this is interesting to you, you could easily participate!  You can get more information here or sign up to participate here.

Do you think this is as cool as I do?  I’d love to know if you decide to participate – and what you find! Let me know in the comments!