Martians wanted!

SPACE: If you’ve always wanted to take a long holiday to a lonely planet, now is your chance. The US space agency, NASA, needs your help to explore Mars.

NASA has created a website called Be a Martian. You can log in as a tourist, or you can become a Martian citiizen. Features of the site include a theatre with videos of Mars discovery missions. These help to educate people about the solar system and space travel, and they are also aimed at getting the public excited about the work of the space agency.

But the main purpose of NASA’s new site is to invite space-lovers to help the agency’s planetary scientists sort and classify thousands of images from Mars. It is an example of crowdsourcing, which is opening a task to the public. People usually work on the project for free.

However, the primary aim of crowdsourcing is not saving money — it is often motivated by having volumes of material or data that are too large for an organization’s employees or even for its computers to handle. "There's so much data coming back from Mars," Michelle Viotti, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the BBC. "Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important."

"Players can help NASA by counting the number of impact craters on Mars"

In one game on the Be a Martian site, players earn points by being able to identify and locate images on a map of the red planet. In another game, they can count the number of impact craters in a particular sector. By using a game platform, NASA also hopes to get young people interested in planetary science. "We really need the next generation of explorers," says VIotti.