Citizen Science Stories

Astronomers found what looks like a glowing cloud of dust from a massive planetary pile-up—and NASA volunteers helped make the discovery!

In 2019, the GLOBE Land Cover project began asking volunteers to help map planet Earth by taking photos of their surroundings facing multiple directions, including north, south, east and west. Now, a new paper by Huang et al. demonstrates how to combine these images using…

The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors projects invite members of the public to search images from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission to find new objects among the nearest stars.

NASA’s Solar Jet Hunter project invites you to help find solar jets, ejections of matter from the Sun. The project was on hold for a few months as the science team worked behind the scenes. It’s re-launching now with new data from…

Congratulations to the six Growing Beyond Earth high school teams who will present their original research at this year’s American Association for Gravitational and Space Research Conference in Washington D.C.! The teams represent Biotech@Richmond Heights (Miami FL), Herbert Henry Dow High School (Midland,…

Sprites, those beguiling electrical flashes of light above thunderstorms, raise so many questions: Why do they take the shapes they do? What conditions in the upper atmosphere trigger them? How do sprites affect Earth’s global electric circuit, and what is…

The first journal article about clouds identified by participants of the Cloudspotting on Mars project has been accepted for publication and is now available online! The article, “The Cloudspotting on Mars citizen science project: Seasonal and spatial cloud distributions observed by the Mars Climate…

Volunteers working with The Daily Minor Planet have made the project’s first big discovery: an asteroid passing very near planet Earth. On the night of October 3rd, a telescope for the Catalina Sky Survey snapped four pictures of a far…

Did you see October 14th’s solar eclipse? Most of the time we can easily forget that we are on a planet spinning and orbiting in space with other celestial bodies. Watching the Moon move across the face of the Sun…

NASA’s Radio JOVE project wants your help to study the Sun! Radio JOVE, in partnership with the SunRISE Ground Radio Lab, is planning to use radio telescopes to make coordinated observations of the Sun for the 2024 solar eclipse. With our plans…