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Space…The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of your internet-connected browser. Its potential mission – to explore strange new photos; to seek out strange new sub-planetoids and new places for the New Horizons spacecraft to land. To boldly go where no geek at their desk has gone before…This is IceHunters.

IceHunters is an ambitious space science project which centers around the New Horizons space probe launched by NASA on January 16, 2006. New Horizons main objective is to be the first man-made object to arrive at, and take pictures of Pluto. No matter how you feel about Pluto’s status in the sky, the fact that a major player in our solar system has yet to have been visited by a spacecraft is an oversight to be corrected when the New Horizons arrives at its destination inside the Kupier Belt in 2015.

Despite this fantastic mission, IceHunters isn’t about that leg of the trip. This project, a subset of the citizen science website Zooiverse, focuses on the final state of New Horizon’s mission. You see, when NASA launched New Horizons, they loaded more than enough fuel aboard the craft to make it to Pluto. Their plan for this fuel sounds like either a stroke of madness, or of genius – they would send New Horizons to visit some objects large enough in the Kupier Belt to take good solid photos and scientific scans of. The thing is, they didn’t know of any acceptable targets when they launched – they hoped that in the following 9 years, a way would be determined to find acceptable targets for New Horizons.

And this, finally, is where IceHunters comes in. Through the powers of crowdsourcing and the internet, IceHunters is giving citizen scientists (which I’ll define as “anyone with a desire to better understand the world around us, no matter how advanced in present understanding”) the ability to search the skies for objects New Horizons can visit. This is done by taking two very long range and very high resolution pictures of the sky, analyzing them and removing via computer anything which doesn’t change. The resulting image contains a series of blobs, streaks and fluctuating stars, all of which can mean something to a space scientist. The task of an IceHunter is to look at this pictures, identify the blobs and streaks, and send in their results.

Said results correspond with sections of the Kuiper belt which may contain targets for New Horizons to land on. Scientists will look over the results, go back to any items which they deem worth rechecking, and then will take new pictures of the sky, and compare. By the time New Horizons sends us images of Pluto in 2015, the team at IceHunters will have come up with enough data for NASA scientists to be able to assign the probe its first extra-solar-system target.

So, how does this project fit into my Changing The World project? In so many incredible ways.

First, the efforts of science and the search for how the Universe works is of vital importance if you want to change the world – you can’t learn how best to play the game if you don’t know the rules, and science is the tool with which we may best understand as many of those rules as our human minds will allow. Any endeavor which advances science, and especially endeavors which allow anyone the ability to understand the goal, become involved and make a difference, is something worth encouraging.

Second, understanding our little corner of the Universe will help us be better prepared when we take out first steps out into the cosmos around us. Earth may be our home, but there will be a day when it will be time to leave that home, and begin exploring the great beyond. The more we can understand about that great beyond, the more prepared we will be when we as a species finally begin the amazing journey which awaits us.

Third, the IceHunters project is amazingly simple and accessible. Anyone with the barest grasp of science could become involved in the project. It is easy enough, in fact, that there are members of the project as young as five looking at the Kuiper Belt for places for New Horizons to visit after its run on Pluto. The fact that anyone with a computer, a good pair of eyes and an understanding of what they’re looking for can become involved in a brand of discovery which normally was the purview of the so-called “rocket scientist” is something I find incredible.

And with this accessibility comes a bit of glory in the process – the names of every person involved in the project is connected to the pictures they help analyse. If you were to be involved with finding the object in the sky which New Horizons will classify as its target, your name will be forever connected with this particular piece of space exploration history. This is as close as many of us common folk will ever get to actually being a starship captain, exploring space and making grand discoveries. The prospect is thrilling to anyone with such dreams, and the chance to be involved is just a few mouse clicks away.