Announcing the ISEE-3 Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission “After a successful reawakening the venerable ISEE-3 spacecraft is about to begin the first interplanetary citizen science mission. We will be beginning the “ISEE-3 Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission” on 10 August 2014 as the spacecraft flies by the Moon. We have a functional space craft that can do science and is already returning new data. All of our original citizen science objectives remain […]

Planet Hunters Finds Extrasolar Planets Via Crowdsourced Effort – Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data, MNRAS – From the Comfort of Home, Web Users May Have Found New Planets, Yale University Think about this: One would think that with this announcement – one that comes on the heels of the Tatooine discovery last week – that the Kepler team […]

20-Million Milestone for 100-Year Citizen Science Project “A citizen science project running for over 100 years reached a key milestone this month when an amateur astronomer contributed the 20 millionth observation of a variable star on February 19, 2011. A variable star changes in brightness over time. Records of these changes can be used to uncover the astrophysical processes within evolving star systems. With a database going back over a […]

Citizen Scientists Join Search for Earth-like Planets, Yale University “Planet Hunters, which is the latest in the Zooniverse citizen science project collection, will ask users to help analyze data taken by NASA’s Kepler mission. The space telescope has been searching for planets beyond our own solar system — called exoplanets — since its launch in March 2009.”

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 […]

NASA Invites Public to Take Virtual Walk On The Moon “More than 37 years after humans last walked on the moon, planetary scientists are inviting members of the public to return to the lunar surface as “virtual astronauts” to help answer important scientific questions. No spacesuit or rocket ship is required – all visitors need to do is go to www.moonzoo.org and be among the first to see the lunar […]