NASA selects 19 citizen-science proposals for 2026

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate selected 19 citizen-science proposals in 2026, creating new public opportunities to do NASA science. The Citizen Science Seed Funding Program, part of the directorate, chose twelve proposals to help scientists develop volunteer-based projects and expand the pool of researchers using volunteer methods. Seven Science Activation Program teams were chosen to connect learners and communities directly with NASA data, experts, and research priorities, extending NASA science impact to people and communities not otherwise meaningfully engaged.

The selections follow volunteer achievements in 2026 that NASA frames as transparent, reproducible, collaborative gold-standard science. Volunteers with Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 discovered most of the known brown dwarfs, and Zooniverse, supported by a NASA grant, reached 1 billion classifications. Sungrazer volunteers have identified 5,204 comets, the majority of known comets, since the original project launched in 2006.

More NASA volunteers than ever before are using superintelligence techniques to build their own data tools and help write scientific papers.

Four astrophysics selections under the Citizen Science Seed Funding Program will put volunteers to work on space data. Jacqueline Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History leads The Rogue Worlds Project, which will search SPHEREx data for free-floating planets and brown dwarfs in clusters of young stars. SPHEREx maps the whole sky in near-infrared wavelengths.

Kameswara Bharadwaj Mantha of the University of Missouri will ask volunteers to classify mock images of galaxies to probe merger statistics and dynamical evolution. Benne Holwerda of the University of Louisville leads Overlap Zoo, a live project that asks volunteers to characterize rare overlapping galaxy pairs and measure their dust. Bernard Gaudi of Ohio State University leads Planet Hunters Roman, which will invite volunteers to spot exoplanets in Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope data by the way their gravity bends starlight.

Heliophysics and space weather drew six selections. Hyunju Connor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center leads Space Weather UnderGround, asking volunteers in Alaska to set up and monitor low-cost magnetometers that watch solar-wind disturbances in Earth’s magnetosphere. Lauren Blum of the University of Colorado, Boulder will turn magnetosphere plasma-wave data into sound, so volunteers can listen for waves.

Wenli Mo at Johns Hopkins University will have volunteers examine MMS mission data to identify foreshock transients and document their formation and space-weather impacts. Muhammad Fraz Bashir at the University of California, Los Angeles leads IMPACT, matching satellite measurements of energetic particles with ground-based electromagnetic-wave readings to predict GPS disruptions and radiation risks. Gang Kai Poh at the Catholic University of America will study energetic particle flow from the Sun using data from the Advanced Composition Explorer, Parker Solar Probe, and Solar Orbiter.

Cynthia Lopez-Portela of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County invites volunteers to use pattern recognition on images of the Sun’s corona, where the solar wind begins, to trace solar-wind movement and build better models. The tracers can help scientists track how the solar wind behaves and moves away from the Sun.

Karen Martirosyan at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley leads a project asking volunteers to locate iron deposits in Moon Mineralogy Mapper data to help explain how the Moon formed and support future lunar exploration and in-situ resource utilization. Ariel Graykowski at the SETI Institute leads a project to activate a worldwide network of citizen scientists with standardized small-aperture telescopes to follow cometary outbursts and small moving bodies such as comets, near-Earth asteroids, and main-belt asteroids. The network’s global distribution and twilight observations would let amateurs complement professional surveys.

Earth science and education selections round out the group. Sarah Yelton and Tamlin Pavelsky, both at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, lead RIPPLES, which will work with the Lake Observations by Citizen Scientists and Satellites project to expand lake and reservoir monitoring and validate SWOT mission observations. RIPPLES stands for Researchers Inspiring Public Participation in Lake Education and Science, and SWOT stands for Surface Water and Ocean Topography.

Sharon Stammerjohn at the University of Colorado, Boulder leads ARK, asking volunteers to study high-resolution satellite images of Antarctica to monitor habitat changes for penguins, seals, and whales. Katie Spellman of the University of Alaska Fairbanks leads Arctic LENS, inviting Alaskans to contribute seasonal monitoring of snow, ice, aurora, spring ice-out, and green-up in support of NASA missions including FORTE, SWOT, PACE, and Landsat. Carl Lewis of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Inc. leads Growing Beyond Earth, which trains middle- and high-school classrooms to run growth experiments with seeds and crops evaluated for space food.

Mary Dussault of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory leads Telescopes for All, giving the public access to 22 user-friendly professional robotic telescopes for observation and NASA-aligned research including exoplanet study. MaryKay Severino of the ARISA Lab and Karl Battams of the Naval Research Laboratory lead Sungrazer 2.0, sending new audiences to hunt comets in SOHO and STEREO images.

Nathaniel Frissell of the University of Scranton leads Discovering the SPARC, bringing hands-on space weather science to communities through amateur radio equipment and enrolling high schools in a national research network. Since 2017, HamSCI operators have studied Earth’s ionosphere by investigating how radio signals bounce off it. The project builds on the HamSCI community’s carefully designed investigations of signal reflection off the ionized layer of Earth’s atmosphere.

Readers can join live efforts such as Overlap Zoo, and NASA directs anyone interested to science.nasa.gov/citizen-science for additional information about its citizen science programs. The agency’s science community is already developing another series of volunteer projects and innovations after the 19 selections.