ECLIPSEMOB: LESSONS LEARNED FROM A NATIONAL SCALE CITIZEN SCIENCE EXPERIMENT DURING THE 2017 SOLAR ECLIPSE

Citizen science has the potential to increase public perception of science and recruit the next generation of STEM researchers. Citizen science also affords unprecedented large scale data crowdsourcing opportunities. EclipseMob is a NSF funded (1638685; 1638697) collaborative effort to design and conduct a nation-wide (U.S.) scale citizen science experiment to study the effects of the 2017 solar eclipse on low-frequency (LF) radio wave propagation to improve our understanding of the ionosphere, which influences our communication and GPS systems.

The EclipseMob project experiment centered on engaging citizens across the U.S. to build simple antenna-receiver systems that work with their cell phones to collect radio frequency data from a WWVB transmitter signal at 60.000 kHz as sound data before, during, and after the eclipse that occurred on August 21, 2017. This data can then be converted and analyzed by researchers to determine geospatial LF propagation patterns (analysis in process). EclipseMob consists of four major phases: experiment design; participant recruitment and training; data collection; and data analysis and dissemination. Here we present the challenges faced, successes, and lessons learned with an eye towards improving and scaling up the experiment and outreach model for the upcoming 2024 eclipse whose totality path similarly transits a large portion of the U.S.