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Well, imagine that you built a giant antenna, a giant telescope really, out of a bunch of
sensors all around the globe and they're all connected by the internet so that together
they work as a large sensing system to detect cosmic rays. What we have is a network of
kids around the world who are collaborating in their science classes to built the world's
largest telescope.
Last year at TED I was inspired by Jill Tarter's wish that we involve earthlings everywhere
in the search for cosmic company and in particular, to try to involve kids in this search.
The ERGO project is kind of unique because it's not run by a bunch of scientists or adults
or anyone. It's run by students.
And basically this is the cosmic ray project because what it does is that we are building
and distributing these detectors and what they do is detect cosmic radiations or muons.
Well, before you think that I'm talking about little green men, I want to tell you a little
bit about cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are showering the earth all the time. Several of them are
passing every minute through your body. They come from all directions in space and there
are lots of theories about what the sources are, where they come from, how they're made.
Some of them are probably pretty well understood but others, especially the very high energy
ones, aren't well understood at all. So, what if we were to get kids involved in helping
us find out where these high energy cosmic rays come from?
If you think of a digital camera where there are a bunch of pixels that pick up pieces
of light in an image, then imagine this camera that's a image sensor the size of the earth
and the pixels aren't all next to each other. Most of the pixels are missing. But each one
of our sensors is a single pixel in this imaging system and it happens to be mounted on the
earth which is spinning around and revolving around the sun. So, all of the pixels get
a view of most of the sky. So over time we're actually assembling an image of the cosmic
ray universe.
What will happen is a cosmic ray will hit the box. It will go through the box. A detector
will detect it. It will say to time stamp, "Hey, what time is it? Where am I?" It will
gather all that location together and send it through the ethernet port onto the internet
to the server and it will read out this box located here at what time got a hit. Each
unit will be able to detect cosmic rays and overlay it on a global map. On this map you
will able to see in this location how many unit hits there are and compare it to other
locations. Then it will be able to calculate patterns and whatnot so it will be able to
find a lot of cool things in all the data.
The long-term goal which we've set as a target is a thousand of these units. If you look
at the earth and you put 100 points on it, it's a pretty meager coverage. But if you
look at 1,000 locations on an earth globe, it starts to look like a real serious array.
Nobody's ever had an array that big and that dense, of course, so it'll be the first time
that it's done.
To do 1,000 units we're going to have to find a lot of help from other places, some funding,
figure out how to make these instruments cheaper and smaller and easier to manufacture, and
I'm sure we'll come up with other improvements along the way.