We have a simple philosophy: HiRISE is “the people’s camera” because we believe that knowledge about Mars belongs to everyone. The BeautifulMars Project, which helps us talk to people who want to learn about Mars but may have little–to–no English skills.

The Catalina Outer Solar System Survey is a citizen science project aimed at discovering the most distant objects in our solar system, Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). The project takes images of the night sky from the Catalina Sky Survey whose mission is to find the closest objects in the solar system, near-Earth asteroids, and looks at them over several months to see the slow movement of TNOs. After possible TNOs have been filtered and identified by a computer, they need a final check by a human to tell if they are real or a false detection. That is where citizen scientists come in!

Are you an amateur astronomer eager to engage in scientific research? Join the Target NEOs! Astronomical League Observing Program (formerly OSIRIS-REx Target Asteroids! citizen science). Your telescope images of near-Earth objects (NEOs) along with measurements of their brightness and positions complement professional observations and fill in the gaps of our knowledge. Combined observations enable scientists to better understand physical properties of asteroids for which little information is known, turning what appears only as a “point of light” into a real world.