OurSky, a technology company based in Southern California, seeks to provide amateur astronomers with the tools they need to add artificial intelligence and open source technology to star scanning. On Monday, OurSky launched the beta version of its network of telescopes connected via APIs after raising nearly $10 million in seed funding.
Founded in 2021 by Dan Roelker and Alex Hawkinson, Los Angeles-based OurSky recently announced that it closed a $9.5 million seed round with investments from Upfront Ventures, Oceans Ventures, Venrex Investment Management, Marlinspike Partners, and Embedded Ventures. .
“What OurSky has done is really unique. We’ve made the sky respond to API requests,” said Alex Hawkinon, OurSky co-founder and president. decryption. “You can make API requests for data, get real-time information from this global array (telescope) very quickly, and then do things with it, and encourage developers to use these APIs to build all kinds of applications moving forward. You can. “It will open up enormous opportunities and the enormous amount of data we have.”
Open source stargazing
“We both see this as not just one company’s show,” said Dan Roelker, OurSky co-founder and CEO. decryption. “We both believe very strongly in open platforms, so people who have ideas about what types of AI models to build and what problems to solve can access them and use OurSky to build these types of activities and modeling. there is.”
Open source technologies enable collaborative development where multiple contributors can add, modify, and improve software, ideally leading to more powerful, innovative, and widely used technologies.
Roelker explained that OurSky currently has 55 telescopes online across 20 locations to track objects in orbit around the Earth, the Moon and beyond. He said OurSky will encourage amateurs to join the network and share data, which can be used for collective discovery and tracking space debris.
“We are getting closer to releasing amateur plugins for some very popular open source platforms that will allow many passionate amateur astronomers to collaborate on citizen science, space object tracking, and many other types of applications,” Roelker said. .
citizen scientist
Like open source models, citizen science involves public collaboration in scientific research as a way to improve data collection and analysis. By participating in citizen science projects, amateur astronomers can help scientists collect and analyze large amounts of data that may be difficult to process on their own.
Although the term ‘citizen science’ was coined in the 1990s, the public has been participating in scientific research for decades. An example of citizen science is Canadian amateur radio operator Scott Tilley. He discovered a long-lost, or “zombie” satellite called IMAGE in 2018, allowing NASA to reestablish contact with it after losing contact with it more than a decade ago.
Between 2015 and 2016, citizen scientists reported seeing an unusual purple glow in the sky 30 times. Enthusiasts dubbed the phenomenon Steve, which researchers on the Aurorasaurus project described as standing for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. Initially an enigma, Steve was later unraveled through combined ground and satellite data, providing new insights into the Earth’s magnetic interactions.
“We’ve built a platform that anyone can use for any purpose,” he said. Whether it’s tracking satellites, exploring space, understanding the moon’s orbit, exploring the solar system, everything.
“We brought all of this together – the community and the telescope – to abstract away the complexities of operating a telescope and open it up to this larger community so they can look at the sky in any direction they want, 24/7. ,” he continued, “and what great things could come of it?”
OurSky offers four subscription tiers, each with improved tracking features and support. The free plan allows users to track two nightly objects. There is a Starter tier at $2,500 per month for 5 user-prioritized nightly objects, an Advanced tier at $5,000 per month for 10 higher-priority nightly objects, and an Enterprise tier for custom pricing for extensive tracking. 24/7 support.
OurSky’s goal is to support the astronomy community by providing free access to important data and photos, Roelker said. Astrophotographers often spend a lot of time processing images, which can be a tedious task, he notes.
Astronomy and Artificial Intelligence
OurSky plans to implement artificial intelligence on its platform, but Hawkinon said OurSky has not yet implemented any AI integrations, but plans to add undisclosed AI models in early 2024.
As AI is used across industries, astronomers are looking to new technologies to create more powerful and widespread tools for space exploration.
Last October, a group of scientists and astronomers from Northwestern University, the California Institute of Technology, Liverpool John Moores University, and the University of Minnesota announced their success in using artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify and classify supernovae. .
NASA has also added this technology to its development of the 2027 Grace Rome Telescope mission, leveraging AI to monitor and explore space.
“One of the things Roman will present to us is a new way to think about the universe,” said Dr. Dominic Benford, program scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman mission. decryption. “The tools we need to develop to process this data are not the tools we used in the past. “It has to be new.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.