GLORIA is a high-profile project for studying the flow of climate across the world that affects the biodiversity that resides in the mountains, especially flora. The project is established at 42 places at different locations of the world among which 9 are located in the United States of America. GLORIA works with a multi summit approach and custom-made low impact monitoring device. It extensively researches on the plants of alpine community and how climate affects plants of mountainous regions.
GLORIA stands for GLObal Robotic Telescope Intelligent Array for e-Science. The project includes creation of an online platform that allows people connected with the internet to operate a network of 13 telescopes around the world that help in unfolding the mysteries of outer space and astronomy.
It reflects the use of citizen science and people’s support for developing awareness and engagement in the field on scientific innovation. The project is touted as the world’s first project that allows citizens to use robotic telescope around the world.
Since October 2011, GLORIA is responsible for upbringing great change in citizen science by allowing independent people to take images from a network of free access telescopes and permitting users to become a part of scientific exploration of space.
The project gives access to 14 telescopes that are located at different places around the world to use for both professional astronomers and people who have a deep insight in astronomy. These people can use telescopes, lead experiments, and employ the end result in their research.
The project aims to facilitate education. For instance, schools in Europe have been using the telescopes under the GLORIA project. It allows student to observe the sky in daytime as they can see the night sky from other parts of the world that are situated somewhere else. The project supplements schools and research department with research and study materials.
Over the last three years. The project has been broadcasting major and regular events of space such as lunar and solar eclipses, auroras, sightings in space, etc. At one time, the project was able to attract 4000,000 spectators around the world.
The project also launched a tool to watch the findings in space through laptops. The web application, Personal Space, allows users to access telescopes from the GLORIA project and make a direct connection with the space and the events going in at that time.
The application facilitates the users to see beautiful images that capture critical moments in space and images of places that have personal importance to the spectator. The spectator can feed the information like date, time, and location in the application and it will direct them to the image of an event that was directly happening in space at the given time.
People can cross reference whether the event specific to their information concedes with any other personal event of other user or any historical event. Another part of the project is dedicated to build links between art and science to make astronomy available to all.