Makers, do you want to help NASA “find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them?” This challenge is for you. SpaceGAMBIT: The Global Alliance of Makers Building Interstellar Technologies is a U.S. federally funded program managed by Hawaii-based not-for-profit Maui Makers. In 2013 SpaceGAMBIT started funding a series of space settlement-related projects including bio-reactors, closed-cycle habitats, and other education projects.
According to their website:
[SpaceGAMBIT is] here to help humanity to survive and expand into space by building grassroots collaborative activities that encourage related education and project development. We enable hackerspaces, makerspaces and other open community groups to work together to carry out space-related research and development, and engage any interested member of their local community in those activities.
In March 2014, SpaceGAMBIT and NASA Ames Research Center entered into a Space Act Agreement to jointly “find crowdsourced solutions through the maker community related to asteroid detection, tracking, and characterization, and novel educational opportunities to expand the understanding of asteroids, astronomy and ultimately increase participation in the Asteroid Grand Challenge.” To support these initiatives, SpaceGAMBIT has now released the 2014 call for proposals for projects that address the following themes:
Fun educational software/websites to explain the Asteroid Grand Challenge and make real science more accessible to the public. This software will be taken to festivals and other events, and be available to use online or download.
Training material for the Asteroid Grand Challenge to engage the maker movement, citizen scientists and the public in general
Making telescopes more accessible to citizen science.
To make proposal writing easier, SpaceGAMBIT provides proposers the opportunity to receive feedback on ideas by filling out a project summary form. All projects are required to be open source and all activities must be done in collaboration with a hackerspace, makerspace, FabLab, or similar community spaces. More can be found at their website: http://www.spacegambit.org/2014-call-projects/
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