Spanish Amateur Scientist Emilio González Discovers Two Impact Craters in Africa

Forrest M. Mims III

Preparing The Citizen Scientist requires frequent searches of the news media and the web to find the latest developments directly or indirectly involve or affect citizen scientists. So a recent e-mail from Society for Amateur Scientists member Mark Streitman was a major surprise, for he had found a significant news item that I had completely missed. Mark's e-mail was about the remarkable discovery of two asteroid impacts in North Africa by Emilio González, an amateur scientist who made his stunning discovery at his home using his computer and the web.

After reading about Emelio's discovery at Astroseti.org, I contacted him and asked if we could publish his report in The Citizen Scientist. Emilio agreed, and his report appears in this issue of TCS. Emilio's article might be considered a feature story by some. Instead, it is published in The Citizen Scientist as a project article. That's because the article includes enough details about how Emilio made his discoveries so that readers will be well equipped to go hunting for asteroid impact sites on their own using the same satellite tools that he used.

Emilio is 37 years old, and last year he formed a company for the distribution of PVC-coated fabrics. He writes:

"I'm an amateur astronomer but have not too much time for this hobby lately. I live 40 km away from Barcelona, Spain, in a small town named Santa Margarida i els Monjos.

"My telescope was previously owned by David Anderson, director of Seti@home. I started translating the Seti@home project into Spanish in 2002. Then many people from all Spanish-speaking countries offered as volunteers for helping me, and I made a nonprofit organization for doing astronomy related public outreach using volunteer translators.

"We are currently translating Science@Nasa into Spanish (see http://ciencia.nasa.gov), JPL's planet Quest, Nasa Astrobiology Institute, etc. I attended several astrobiology workshops, and, because of our public outreach effort, the NASA Astrobiology Institute invited us to make a poster presentation at the 2004 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon 2004). I suppose this helped a lot in my impact crater discovery, because I had already read many things about impact craters.

"Probably people will think that I'm not as amateur as they expected, but, really, I never went to University, and my knowledge is only acquired by translating. Now we have more than 60 volunteers, and I don't have time for translating. Instead, I'm doing webmaster tasks at Astroseti.org.

"I'm preparing two abstracts about this issue [impact craters], one for the International Astrophysics Congress to be held in Valencia, Spain, this year, focused more on the use of public software for scientific purposes, and a more specialized one for an impact structures workshop next June in Sweden.

"So my life has changed a lot in just three days! For Astroseti.org has passed from just doing outreach to participate in science in some way."

You can read all about Emilio's discoveries in "How to Discover Asteroid Impacts: The Story of the Discovery of Two Impact Craters" in this issue of The Citizen Scientist. Maybe you can join Emilio González in being first to discover a previously unreported impact crater.