Be a Martian! is a government 2.0 initiative that invite citizens to participate in scientific research about the planet Mars by visiting an interactive web site and performing research tasks disguised as games. 

Visitors, who are called “citizen scientists,” assist NASA scientists by counting craters and matching photos to help improve Martian Maps. 

The site also serves as a way to help the federal government learn first-hand about how to use cloud computing delivery models. The Be a Martian! site is built on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-as-service (PaaS).  

See also: crowdsourcing, Mechanical Turk, government cloud computing plan

Learn more about Be a Martian!:

Enroll as a virtual Martian citizen and start exploring. 

14 Jul 2010