The Radio Jove Project: Citizen Science Contributes to Jupiter Decametric Radio Research

Abstract:

The Radio Jove Project is a hands-on educational activity in which students, teachers, and the general public build a simple radio telescope, usually from a kit, to observe single frequency decameter wavelength radio emissions from Jupiter, the Sun, the galaxy, and the Earth. Regular monitoring of Jupiter and solar radio storms is typical, and Radio Jove amateur observations have improved in their scientific utility. Some observers have upgraded their equipment to make spectroscopic observations in the frequency band from 15-30 MHz. These observations can be particularly useful when made in conjunction with professional telescopes such as the Long Wavelength Array (LWA), the Nancay Decametric Array, the Ukrainian UTR-2 Radio Telescope, etc. The coming Juno mission to Jupiter will observe the radio emissions while in orbit at Jupiter and will benefit from the Earth-based perspective provided by frequent monitoring of the emissions. With these goals in mind work is now underway to provide simple methods of archiving the Radio Jove observations for use by the amateur and professional radio science community in scientifically useful and easily analyzed formats. The data will be ingested to both Radio Jove specific databases and to archives containing a variety of “waves” data. Methods are being developed to assure the scientific validity of contributed data such as certification of the observers. Amateur scientists have made overwhelming contributions to optical astronomy and we believe the same is possible within the radio astronomy community as well.