citizen scientists tagged posts

Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered unusual ridge networks on Mars using images from spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet. How and why the ridges formed and what clues they may provide about the history of Mars has remained unknown.

A team of scientists, led by Aditya Khuller of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and Laura Kerber of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, set out to learn more about these ridges by mapping a large area of Mars with th...

This artist’s concept illustrates a close-up view of a cool brown dwarf. Objects like this, drifting just beyond our solar system, have been imaged by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and could be discovered by Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA is inviting the public to help search for possible undiscovered worlds in the outer reaches of our solar system and in neighboring interstellar space. A new website, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, lets everyone participate in the search by viewing brief movies made from images captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. It highlight objects that have gradually moved across the sky.

“There are just over 4 light-years between Neptune and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and much of this...

The Zooniverse citizen science project Space Warps recently reported that its online volunteers have helped to discover 29 new gravitational lenses, and 30 other possible lenses from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. Not only are these important discoveries in their own right but they also prove just how good citizen scientists are at hunting down unusual objects. Credit; http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/hunting-%E2%80%98halos%E2%80%99-universe-0

Thanks to the Internet, amateur volunteers known as “citizen scientists” can readily donate their time and effort to science–in fields ranging from medicine to zoology to astrophysics...