Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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For thousands of years humans have calculated pi on the Earth. Now we have a chance to be the first people in history to calculate pi on a different celestial body. We’re going to calculate pi on the Moon.
Do we already know the value of pi? Yes*. Have we already been to the Moon? Also yes. Has humankind ever done both those things at once? No. Not yet. Not until now.
Matt Parker is famous for calculating pi in ridiculous ways as a celebration of mathematics, nerdiness and human ingenuity. He’s calculated pi with colliding masses, water molecules and of course with actual pies. Matt holds the world record for most digits calculated by hand by a living person (139 of them). And now he’s going to the Moon.
Or rather: Astrobotic are going to Moon. Astrobotic Technology is an aerospace company in Pittsburgh and their Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1) is a lunar lander mission that will land at the lunar South Pole (the “Nobile Region”). This is the largest lunar lander that’s been built since the Apollo program’s Lunar Module. Once landed, their CubeRover-1 will venture out onto the Moon’s surface, and on that rover will be our code.
Our code will use the sensors on CubeRover-1 to sample the lunar environment and use it as a source of randomness. This lunar randomness will feed into a stochastic method for calculating pi. Every time CubeRover-1 is not otherwise busy doing science, our code will be activated for one LOOP: Lunar Observation Of Pi. During each LOOP as many random lunar samples as possible will be taken, and a new lunar value of pi will be calculated and this will be added to a mission-long running-total value of pi; the first ever value of pi calculated on the Moon.
So, Astrobotic offered a code-module spot on the rover to Matt because they thought he would do something interesting with it. Check. But this ridiculous pi module will result in some extra costs which Astrobotic can’t exactly bill to a different mission partner. Which is where you come in. Much like Matt’s giant calculation of pi by hand: this is going to require a big team effort.
If we get enough funding to cover the additional engineering time required to load on Matt’s code (and run tests to make sure it will not jeopardise the mission), as well as the data transmission costs to get pi back from the Moon: this project is all go. These costs total $150,000 USD (those lunar data plans are not cheap).
You can help raise this money and be a Mathstronaut. You can sponsor a LOOP and get your own personal value of Lunar Pi. Or join the Flight Support Crew and go along for the ride and hopefully get called up for a LOOP.
As of June 12th, this project has raised $311,000 of their $101,875 goal. This project has 26 days left to raise as much as it can. For a pledge of $15, you will get your name in space. For a pledge of $151, you will get a message from the moon. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/standupmaths/moon-pi-were-going-to-calculate-on-the-moon
