Exactly four months after the Transglobal Car Expedition reached the North Pole the expedition made its way to Geneva, Switzerland. The Transglobal Citizen Science School forum, hosted at CERN and sponsored by the Goodgear Around the World Association, PolarQuest, and the MW Shakhnovskiy Foundation, brought together three teams from Lebanon, Georgia, and Uganda, with a total of around 20 future scientists participating. The generous support of Olga and Vasily Shakhnovskiy, through their family foundation, made this event possible for students from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, covering all travel expenses to Switzerland and France.
The Citizen Science School Forum at CERN was organized to inspire the next generation of scientists by immersing them in the world of research and discovery. To this end, students were not merely visitors to CERN but active participants, having conducted their own scientific research prior to their arrival at CERN through various citizen science initiatives.
One of the key projects, CREDO, offered students the opportunity to explore one of the theories of Dark Matter. One idea is that it is made of “super-massive particles” born in the early Universe. If this theory proved to be true, while we cannot see such particles directly, we know that at the end of their life they would produce very high energy photons. Interacting with the atmosphere, such photons would create “super-preshowers” of low-energy particles. We are unable to see dark matter particles, but we can observe these super-preshowers – and that is exactly what our citizen scientists did. Equipped with smartphones, the student teams became particle hunters, contributing to the world’s largest cosmic radiation detector by capturing the remarkable number of 404,000 cosmic radiation particles.
Another project, Globe at Night, aimed to raise awareness about light pollution. The citizen scientists engaged in this initiative by measuring the brightness of the night sky, collecting extensive data that highlights the impact of artificial lighting on our environment. Their contributions added valuable data to a global effort to understand light pollution.
At CERN, our citizen scientists were able to engage directly with the scientific processes that power some of the world’s most advanced research. By building Cloud Chambers, analyzing cosmic ray data, and visiting pivotal CERN sites like the Synchrocyclotron, the CERN Control Center and the Antimatter Factory, they saw firsthand how theoretical concepts translate into real-world applications. The students showed remarkable curiosity, showing their deep understanding of the subject matter.
They interacted with not only CERN scientists but also the Transglobal Expedition crew. Among other things, the crew talked about their record of taking the northernmost measurement of cosmic rays. The students also learned about other aspects of the expedition, including the expedition’s use of satellite guidance to make their way in the melting polar ice shelf and the ice thickness in situ measurements, another first in polar science, that the crew has been carrying out while crossing the Canadian Arctic towards the North Pole and back via Greenland. They also got some information on the challenges the expedition crew had to overcome on their journey, travelling around 10,000 km in 4 months, and having had to adapt to extreme climate.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the Geneva program was its potential to inspire. By interacting with scientists and the Transglobal crew, contributing to scientific research with their own citizen science projects, and exploring the inner workings of CERN and the Transglobal Car Expedition, the students were encouraged to further pursue science.
At the end of the event Nakirijja Betty, supervisor for the Uganda team, expressed how much this experience meant to her and her students:
“Thank you for giving us the opportunity to travel here and see the different machines that physicists have made. In our country, we know about the theory part of it, but for the first time, my students and I were able to see the equipment that follows these theories. And I am sure, this experience is going to change a student’s life”.
