NASA Selects 19 New Citizen Science Proposals in 2026

So far, 2026 has seen a flood of successes for volunteers who do NASA science, exemplifying NASA’s commitment to gold-standard science—transparent, reproducible and intrinsically collaborative. The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project announced that their project volunteers have nowdiscovered most of the known brown dwarfs, celestial objects that are similar to planets. The Zooniverse platform, with grant from NASA, reached a milestone of1 billion classifications.Several projects have come online that leverage new super intelligence (SI) techniques to amplify or extend the work of volunteers. More NASA volunteers are using SI tobuild their own data toolsand helpwrite scientific papersthan ever before. Even with all of those achievements, our science community is already working on the next round of new volunteer projects and innovations. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has selected nineteen proposals from research teams in 2026 that will result in new opportunities for you to do NASA science. The Citizen Science Seed Funding Program (CSSFP-25) of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate aims to support scientists and other experts to develop citizen science projects and expand the pool of professional scientists who use citizen science techniques in their science investigations. Twelve new proposals to this program were selected. “The Rogue Worlds Project: Activating volunteers to uncover the hidden population of super Jupiters with SPHEREx”led by Principal Investigator Jacqueline Faherty from the American Museum of Natural History. This project will invite you to search data from NASA's SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) mission to find free-floating planets and brown dwarfs in clusters of young stars. The SPHEREx space observatory mapping the entire sky in near-infrared wavelengths. “Quantifying the calibrations between intrinsic galaxy merger timescales with visual pair/tidal-feature classifications”led by Principal Investigator Kameswara Bharadwaj Mantha of the University of Missouri. This project will investigate galaxy mergers, helping astronomers understand how galaxies evolve through time. You will be invited to classify realistic mock images of galaxies to help probe the statistics and dynamical evolution of galaxy mergers. “Overlap Zoo; cosmic light tables for galaxy transparency”led by Principal Investigator Benne Holwerda of the University of Louisville. Galaxies, which glow with the light of the billions of stars they contain, also contain dust. This dust is easiest to see and quantify when it overlaps, or is backlit by, another galaxy. Help spot and characterize these rare overlapping galaxy pairs to help reveal how much dust they contain.Overlap Zoo is live! Follow this link to learn more and join the project. “Planet Hunters Roman: Extending Citizen Science to Planetary Microlensing”led by Principal Investigator Bernard Gaudi of the Ohio State University. Exoplanets are planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. Their gravity can bend the light that travels around them. This project will invite you to spot exoplanets in data from NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope data by the way they bend starlight. “Space Weather UnderGround: Deploying a low-cost Magnetometer Array with Citizens for Heliophysics Research”led by Principal Investigator Hyunju Connor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Along with sunshine, our Sun produces the solar wind, an unrelenting flow of charged particles. Earth's protective magnetic field shield deflects most of these particles, but not all, and not during extreme events. Help scientists monitor the subtle disturbances of Earth’s magnetosphere by the solar wind by setting up and monitoring your own magnetometer in Alaska. “A Citizen Science Initiative for Sonified Plasma Wave Characterization”led by Principal Investigator Lauren Blum of the University Of Colorado, Boulder. “Plasma” is the name given to the ionized gases at the edge of Earth’s magnetosphere. Solar wind, the rain of charged particles that flows out from the Sun, can interact with and generate waves in the plasma. This project will turn data from this dynamic zone into sound signals. You will be invited to listen in to identify waves in the Earth’s magnetosphere. “Revealing the Consequences of Foreshock Transients for Earth's Magnetospheric System Through Participatory Science”led by Principal Investigator Wenli Mo at the Johns Hopkins University. This project will invite you to examine data from NASA’s MMS (Magnetospheric Multiscale) mission to identify “foreshock transients,” phenomena that have a critical but poorly understood role in space weather. The resulting dataset will help reveal how foreshock transients form, their properties, and their impacts. “IMPACT: Interactive Magnetospheric Particle Analysis and Citizen Technology”led by Principal Investigator Muhammad Fraz Bashir at the University of California, Los Angeles. Energetic particles rain down from the magnetosphere into the upper ionosphere, heating and perturbing the ionosphere, disrupting the scatter of radio waves and GPS operations. This project will invite you to help match patterns between two types of data: measurements from satellites flying overhead that detect energetic particles raining down from space and measurements from ground-based instruments that detect electromagnetic waves. By comparing these patterns, volunteers will help scientists figure out which types of space waves are causing different kinds of particle precipitation, and in turn, help scientists better understand and predict disruptions to GPS and increased radiation risks during space weather events. “Unlocking Clues About Particle Acceleration and Transport Using Particle Distributions”led by Principal Investigator Gang Kai Poh at the Catholic University Of America. NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer, Parker Solar Probe, and Solar Orbiter are complementary missions gathering data to help scientists improve understanding of the Sun, solar wind, and space weather. Examine data from these missions to contribute to the study of the complicated flow of energetic particles from the Sun. “Data Fusion in Space: Combining Citizen Observations to Classify Solar Wind Tracers”led by Principal Investigator Cynthia Lopez-Portela of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This project will invite you to use their pattern-recognition skills to spot features in images of the Sun’s corona, where the solar wind begins. These features can be used as tracers to help scientists track the movement of the solar wind and build better models of how it behaves. “Mapping Lunar Iron Abundance Hotspots to Enable In-Situ Resource Utilization of Regolith Consolidation Technologies”led by Principal Investigator Karen Martirosyan at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. Building a base on the Moon will require creative use of Moon materials. So what materials will future teams of astronaut base-builders have to work with? This project will invite you to help locate iron deposits in data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper mission to help understand how the Moon formed and to aid future exploration. “Small Body Discovery and Outburst Monitoring with a Worldwide Citizen Science Telescope Network”led by Principal Investigator Ariel Graykowski at the SETI Institute. This project proposes to activate a global network of citizen scientists, each equipped with a standardized small-aperture telescope, to conduct follow-up observation of cometary outbursts and small moving bodies (comets, near-Earth asteroids, and main-belt asteroids). With their global distribution and a program of twilight observations, amateurs will complement professional surveys. The project will develop systems to automate processing of contributed images and to distribute alerts for objects of interest to the network. TheScience Activation Program(SciAct) from NASA’s Science Mission D