Citizen Science

Use Aurorasaurus to spot the aurora and report it. Your report will help others see it too. Volunteers use the website, iOS, or Android apps to get alerts, help find real-time sightings from social media, learn about the aurora and more.

Is there a large planet at the fringes of our solar system awaiting discovery? At Backyardworlds.org, you can help NASA search for this planet and for new brown dwarfs in the backyard of the solar system. In this project, we'll ask you to help us distinguish real celestial objects from image artifacts in data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The real objects are brown dwarfs and low-mass stars, the Sun's nearest neighbors. You may find an object closer than Proxima Centauri (the closest star to the Sun) or even discover the Sun's hypothesized ninth planet, which models suggest might appear in these images.

CosmoQuest invites you to help NASA scientists make maps of scientifically interesting features in our Solar System. You can map craters on the Moon and trace the splatter of asteroid impacts on Vesta. Or sort evidence of Mercury’s scarred surface and search for the youngest Martian dune surfaces and evidence of past volcanic eruptions on Mars. All these worlds are yours to explore! Visit https://cosmoquest.org/x/ to learn how to participate.

Help NASA find new disks, homes of extra solar planets, by classifying images from NASA's WISE telescope and other observatories at DiskDetective.org. In this citizen science project, you'll look at animated images of disk candidates and sort them, distinguishing good candidates from galaxies, asteroids, image artifacts and so on. This project, suitable for elementary students through expert adults, will yield targets for the James Webb Space Telescope and publications in the professional scientific literature.

GLOBE Observer is an international network of citizen scientists and scientists working together to learn more about our shared environment. To participate, just download the GLOBE Observer app and submit regular observations.

The GLOBE Observer Program currently accepts cloud, and mosquito habitat and larvae observations. The cloud observations help NASA scientists understand clouds from below (the ground) and above (from space). Clouds play an important role in transferring energy from the Sun to different parts of the Earth system. Since clouds can change rapidly, scientists need frequent observations from citizen scientists. Mosquitoes are a serious health risk: tens of millions of people die each year from mosquito borne disease. While climate and weather conditions can suggest to scientists where we can expect spikes in mosquito populations during the year, we don’t know for sure what is happening unless we make observations on the ground.

iSeeChange is a community weather and climate journal for participants nationwide that uniquely combine citizen observations with cutting-edge weather and satellite data. iSeeChange also works to connect the public to journalists and scientists who can help answer and report on climate related questions. Currently, the project is partnering with NASA to create a citizen science corps that will correlate community experiences to space-based observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, season-to-season, year-to-year.

Become an Image Detective and use your geography skills to geolocate astronaut photography of Earth. If you have always wanted to associate those amazing photographs of our beautiful planet taken from space with their locations on the Earth, Image Detective is the perfect tool for you. By doing so, you will help to locate hundreds of thousands of images and enhance your geography skills at the same time.

NASA's Juno mission’s color camera JunoCam sends new views of the planet back to Earth, allowing the public will act as a virtual imaging team, participating in key steps of the process. Amateur astronomers are invited to submit images of Jupiter from their own telescopes. These views are the basis for online discussions and voting about what locations JunoCam should image as it passes over the planet. Once JunoCam has taken the images, you can download the raw images, process them with your choice of software and re-upload them to the site for other users to view.

Help NASA find networks of giant ridges on Mars by classifying images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In this citizen science project, you'll look at high resolution images of the surface of Mars and flag all of the images that have ridge networks in them. This project, suitable for elementary students through expert adults, will yield new targets for the HiRISE camera around Mars and publications in the professional scientific literature. Visit http://ridges.planetfour.org to learn how to participate.

Are you an amateur astronomer eager to engage in scientific research? Join the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission team by participating in Target Asteroids! Your telescope images of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) along with measurements of their brightness and positions complement professional observations and fill in the gaps of our knowledge. Combined observations enable scientists to better understand physical properties of asteroids for which little information is known, refine their orbits, and determine their parent asteroid families, turning what appears only as a “point of light” into a real world.

Additional annual “measuring campaigns” are available for citizen scientists who do not own equipment. These month-long campaigns provide images from large telescopes at dark-sky sites to a limited number of “measurers” who submit asteroid data to the Target Asteroids! program.