Tag: Citizen Science

2 Min Read NASA Volunteers Find Fifteen Rare “Active Asteroids” NASA’s Active Asteroids project Credits: Henry Hsieh Some extraordinary asteroids have “activity”—comet-like tails or envelopes of gas and dust.  NASA’s Active Asteroids project announced the discovery of activity on fifteen asteroids, challenging conventional wisdom about the solar system. To find these fifteen rare objects, more than 8000 volunteers combed through 430,000 images from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Victor M. Blanco telescope in Chile. A paper about the results, now published in the Astronomical Journal, includes nine volunteers…

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2 min read New Patterns in Mars’s Clouds Revealed by Volunteers Volunteers found that clouds in Mars’s atmosphere cluster at certain latitudes and altitudes. White patches in this pair of plots shows where Cloudspotting participants spotted the most clouds (or “arch peaks” in the project lingo). Red labels highlight a few interesting regions: 1) where high-altitude Carbon Dioxide-ice clouds form; 2) water-ice clouds that show a different pattern between day and night; and 3) clouds that form in a cold region over the poles. Credit: Adapted from Slipski et al.…

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2 min read Daily Minor Planet Volunteers Spot an Asteroid Passing Close to Earth The Catalina Sky Survey telescope “G96” with the follow-up telescope “I52” in the background. Credit: David Rankin Volunteers working with The Daily Minor Planet have made the project’s first big discovery: an asteroid passing very near planet Earth. On the night of October 3rd, a telescope for the Catalina Sky Survey snapped four pictures of a far northern section of the sky. The next day, volunteers  H. N. DiRuscio, X. Liao, V. Gonano and E. Chaghafi spotted a clear…

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