Partners

CosmoQuest is made possible thanks to the contributions of a community of individuals and organizations. Below you can learn about all of our partners. To find our more about the individuals you will meet throughout the site, click over to About Us!

Build Team

The Center for
Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics
Research, Education, & Outreach
at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

The Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Center for STEM Research, Education and Outreach comprises an independent group of researchers and educators, innovating ways to engage students and the public in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Within the SIUE Graduate School, the STEM Center @SIUE brings together research faculty, graduate students and practitioners to conduct education research. The Center’s team maintains CosmoQuest’s software and develops and assesses educational content.

Astrosphere New Media Association

Dedicated to promoting science through internet-based technologies & distribution, Astrosphere focuses on the creation of technologies & content that enable better astronomy communications & content access for the public. Their team maintains the Astrogear shop and produces Astronomy Cast & 365 Days of Astronomy – two of the science and astronomy podcasts you’ll find here at CosmoQuest.

Universe Today

Minute by minute, Universe Today reports all that is new in astronomy, space science, and space exploration. Their team provides CosmoQuest with expertise on systems architecture & project management, while keeping us up-to-date in this ever changing field. Universe Today also produces the Weekly Space Hangout in partnership with CosmoQuest to keep you informed on all the space news and beautiful night sky sights.

McREL International

McREL International is a non-profit, non-partisan education research and development organization that since 1966 has turned knowledge about what works in education into practical, effective guidance and training for K–12 teachers and education leaders across the U.S. and around the world.
McREL’s consultants will work with educators to integrate CosmoQuest activities into the classroom and help deepen their practice through a CosmoQuest professional learning community highlighting space and earth sciences. In addition, McREL’s research and evaluation team will conduct rigorous internal evaluation of CosmoQuest initiatives to ensure the project is reaching its goal of making impactful innovations.

Planetary Science Institute

The Planetary Science Institute studies the origin, characteristics and evolution of our solar system, including Earth, and the origin, characteristics, and evolution of the planetary systems of other stars, and conveys the resulting knowledge to the scientific community and the public at large. This knowledge is used to support and encourage both human and robotic exploration of space and to promote science education and science literacy, by providing the facilities, infrastructure, and institutional settings necessary for the scientists and staff to achieve these goals. PSI will provide professional development to formal and informal educators to help students engage with current NASA data. Additionally, PSI will lead an effort to increase the number of astronomy related science fair projects, locally in Arizona and across the nation.

Ward Beecher Planetarium

The existence of the Ward Beecher Planetarium at Youngstown State University is due to the generosity of Youngstown industrialist and philanthropist Ward Beecher. In accordance with his wishes that the sciences benefit young people, the planetarium has always been free and open to the public. The planetarium will be developing full-dome video and 3D animation materials that will be distributed for free to planetaria across the globe. See more at Science on the Halfsphere.

Astronomical Society of the Pacific

As a non-profit membership organization, international in scope, the ASP’s mission is to increase the understanding and appreciation of astronomy — through the engagement of our many constituencies — to advance science and science literacy. The ASP will be creating, field-testing, and maintaining a series of interactive demos that are designed to compliment CosmoQuest’s Citizen Science Portals.

Johnson Space Center

Johnson Space Center was established in 1961, and from the early Gemini, Apollo and Skylab projects to today’s Space Shuttle and International Space Station Programs, the Center continues to lead NASA’s efforts in human space exploration. Their staff and scientists will be assisting CosmoQuest to help earth scientists more effectively use astronaut images to study our changing planet.

McDonald Observatory

McDonald Observatory, a research unit of The University of Texas at Austin, is one of the world’s leading centers for astronomical research, teaching, and public education and outreach. This institution will, in coordination with NASA, train teachers from regional school districts to integrate citizen science projects and curricula into their classroom programs. They will provide residential master teacher workshops at McDonald Observatory, smaller workshops at the Texas state science teachers’ conference, and work to help in pilot testing new activities, lesson plans, and materials for Citizen Science projects. These master teachers will also go back and train more teachers at their institutions, broadening the reach of this program.

Lawrence Hall of Science

The Lawrence Hall of Science is UC Berkeley’s public science center. We have been providing parents, kids, and educators with opportunities to engage with science since 1968. This institution will be responsible for creating a repository of opensource data visualizations and renderings of NASA SMD imagery and creating new imagery/footage to disseminate CosmoQuest citizen science programs through Science on the Sphere technology.

InsightSTEM

At InsightSTEM, they believe that STEM learning can be reinvented for all, by motivating, enabling, and permitting learners to explore knowledge, through projects that deliver immersive, tactile, physically and mentally engaging learning tools; environments, and train others do the same! InsightSTEM will lead all efforts to train experts to work with citizen scientists and classroom teachers, mentor school children on science fair projects, and teach in the CosmoAcademy program.

Interface Guru

Interface Guru helps create successful digital products such as websites, apps, enterprise software, and touchscreens for a wide variety of clients in diverse industries. They will be providing expert design and maintenance for the CosmoQuest site, enabling efficient and effective communication. They’ll also maintain reliable, accessible interfaces for CosmoQuest’s related citizen science projects.

Community Partners

Astronomers Without Borders

Astronomers Without Borders fosters understanding and goodwill across national and cultural boundaries by creating relationships through the universal appeal of astronomy. Astronomers Without Borders projects promote sharing. Sharing resources. Sharing knowledge. Sharing inspiration. All through a common interest in something basic and universal. Sharing the sky. Astronomers Without Borders: One People, One Sky. Boundaries vanish when we look skyward.

Planetary Society

Focused on inspiring the people of Earth to explore other worlds, understand our own, and seek life elsewhere, the Planetary Society sponsors novel and innovative projects that will “seed” further exploration. The Planetary Society was founded to inspire and involve the world’s public in space exploration through advocacy, projects, and education. Like CosmoQuest, they believe that our next age of exploration will have everyday people involved in making great discoveries and acquiring new knowledge about our solar system.

Educational Partners

Galileo Teacher Training Program

The goal of the Galileo Teacher Training Program is to train teachers in the effective use and transfer of astronomy tools and existing resources that are freely available on the internet (like CosmoQuest!), into classroom science curricula. Through workshops, online training tools and basic education kits, the products and techniques developed by this programme can be adapted to reach locations with few resources of their own, as well as computer-connected areas that can take advantage of access to robotic optical and radio telescopes, webcams, astronomy exercises, cross-disciplinary resources, image processing and digital universes (web and desktop planetariums).

Swinburne Astronomy Online

Designed for science educators and communicators, people working in astronomy related fields, amateur astronomers, and anyone with a love of astronomy, Swinburne Astronomy Online (SAO) is a fully online postgraduate degree program in astronomy. At CosmoQuest, we recognize that there are limits to what we can teach & encourage people who want to learn more to get a degree through Swinburne Astronomy Online.

Dark Skies Bright Kids

Dark Skies, Bright Kids is an after-school astronomy program based in central Virginia dedicated to spreading the love and knowledge of astronomy to students in elementary schools. Using hands-on activities, the volunteers foster students’ natural curiosity and make science accessible and tangible. DSBK is in the process of refining and publishing all of their activities on their website and will be coming out with two bilingual astronomy books for children.

Data & Science

Canadian Astronomical Data Center

The Canadian Astronomical Data Centre at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics is home to many of the world’s most accessed astronomical data sets. From the Hubble Legacy Archive to the DAO Spectroscopic Plate Archive, to data from the Digital Sky Survey, CADC is your go to source of stellar (and galactic and planetary) images, spectra, and more – including the data found in projects on this site, including IceInvestigators! In 2012, the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) delivered over 1.6 million individual files, comprising over 117TB of data and served data to roughly 2000 professional astronomers.

Dawn Mission

As a mission belonging to NASA’s Discovery Program, Dawn delves into the unknown, drives new technology innovations, and achieves what’s never been attempted before. In Dawn’s case, it spent a year orbiting one member of the main asteroid belt, Vesta, before heading to gather yet more data at a second, Ceres, with an arrival date in early 2015. With CosmoQuest, you can help make the first maps of Vesta’s features.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has forever changed our view of the moon, literally bringing it into sharper focus and showing us the whole globe in unprecedented detail. It is a robotic mission that set out to map the moon’s surface and, after a year of exploration, was extended with a unique set of science objectives. With CosmoQuest’s Moon Mapper project you can help scientists extend our understanding of the Earth’s nearest neighbor.

MESSENGER

The MErcury Surface Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) Mission is returning the first new spacecraft data from Mercury since the Mariner 10 mission over 30 years ago. Using its full suite of instruments, MESSENGER is investigating the geologic history of Mercury in great detail, including the portions of the planet never seen by Mariner 10. With CosmoQuest you can become part of the team using this new data to understand the the planet nearest the Sun.

New Horizons

The New Horizons mission is on a voyager to visit the last of the solar system’s classic 9 planets. After its 2015 flyby, the spacecraft will have enough fuel on board to visit possibly two additional icy bodies in the outer solar system. With the IceInvestigators project you can help us discover candidates for exploration!

Equipment Partners

Galileoscope

Created as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, the Galileoscope Project has designed a simple refracting telescope that is sturdy enough for kids, can be used as an optical bench in the classroom, and gives anyone a view on the sky better than anything Galileo ever saw! Enjoy the rings of Saturn, and explore bright star clusters. Galileoscopes are part of many CosmoQuest teacher kits, and we support their “Telescopes for Teachers” program.