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Astronomycast, episode 272, from Monday, September 17, 2012, A. BioGenesis.

Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Cain, I'm the publisher of University Day, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Evertsville.

Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you doing Fraser?

Doing good. So once again, as always, we are recording this episode of Astronomycast as a live Google Plus Hangout, so you can join us live on the Google Pluses on Monday,

noon, Pacific, three Eastern, 18, no, 2000, French Meantime, or at least London time, they're not always the same.

On London time, yeah, and then join us live, and you can ask us questions, and you can watch us record, and you can see how Pamela uses her hands in the recording to show objects rotating and things flying at the screen, so it's a real treat.

And you can also see the episodes on YouTube now as well, so, but it's great to have people join us live.

The other thing is we're now doing I think four different shows every week on Google Plus, so we've got our weekly science hour on Wednesdays, we've got the weekly space Hangout on Thursdays, we do our virtual star party on Sunday nights, and then Astronomycast on Monday.

So we got lots of great science and space coverage for you, but we've got a new project to mention this week Pamela.

We do, so over on Cosmic Quest, we have what's called Asteroid Mappers, which is a new project that takes data from the dawn mission, and this is data that is just released that isn't available in the planetary data center yet, and so you can be among the very first people to look at images of Vesta, and we're working on creating a map of Vesta, mapping out where the craters are, mapping out where the boulders are, trying to figure out where other interesting geological

features are, and so if you want to help out with the NASA dawn mission science team, we invite you to become part of what we're doing over at Asteroid Mappers.

So join us on Cosmic Quest, and you can actually help define the craters on Vesta, which the scientists will actually incorporate into their research.

So I mean, that's it. If you ever wanted to contribute to science, now is your chance. That's really, that's really cool. And what I love about this is that these are brand new images. I mean, they're not coming from, you know, people haven't mapped these craters or seen them ever before. These are brand new images raw from the dawn mission.

At the highest resolution, so we're not down sampling anything or doing anything like that.

Yeah, that's really, that's really exciting.

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