The main goal of the ERGO Project is to give students an opportunity to see their surroundings in a new and profound way. This is accomplished through the use of sensitive detectors in classrooms spread all over the planet. These devices are interlinked over the internet, creating an observatory on a global scale. The devices are astonishingly simple to operate.
Get an ERGO Pixel
If your school or other educational institution would like to host one of the ERGO pixels, fill in a grant application. We are looking for curious, enthusiastic teachers and students in every location on Earth. Hosting an ERGO pixel is easy, and we currently have grants available for interested teachers and schools. Just fill out the ERGO Grant Application and we’ll be in touch.
Classroom Experiments
If you are hosting an ERGO pixel, there is no limit to the experiments you can do to study what effects cosmic rays and other background radiation. Go down into a mine; fly a balloon; climb to the top of a mountain or tall building; study the effect of shielding with various substances. Most important, share your results with the entire ERGO project, so we can all understand and build on your results.
Data Analysis
If you’re interested in participating in the project without hosting an ERGO pixel, we have needs for educators, mathematicians, physicists, data analysts, and statisticians. Let us know how you’d like to participate by emailing ergotelescope@gmail.com
Whether they host a pixel or not, everyone may use the collected data to do retrospective analyses, look at regularities and patterns in the rate of cosmic rays and see how detection rates vary over Earth, how they change throughout the year, and how they are affected by such things as magnetic storms and solar activity cycles. The involvement of a classroom can range from simple counting and averaging of their own data, to comparing their data with those of another location on earth—or to much more complex geometrical and mathematical analyses.
Users may also choose to monitor data in real time as collected to look for global or large-area events that caused by extremely high-energy rays or by clusters of rays. One possible type of analysis, relating to the search for extraterrestrial signals, would be the determination by spherical triangulation of of origin of ensembles of rays. If there are any such ensembles, or pulses, of multiple cosmic-ray particles arriving at Earth, they would blanket Earth in about twenty milliseconds, given their relativistic velocities.
Other ways to present the ERGO data, such as visual representations, Google Earth maps, and other graphical means can be developed by participants in the ERGO network. Contact us at ergotelescope@gmail.com if you’d like access to the ERGO database.