Citizen Science: Will NASA Lead or Fall Behind?

Citizen Scientists Discover Rotating Pulsar, NSF
“Idle computers are the astronomers’ playground: Three citizen scientists–an American couple and a German–have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries. This is the first genuine astronomical discovery by a public volunteer distributed computing project”