NASA selects 19 citizen science proposals for 2026
1 min readNASA said in an announcement published Wednesday 28 October 2026 that its Science Mission Directorate selected 19 proposals from research teams in 2026. The proposals will create opportunities for people to take part in NASA science.
NASA’s Citizen Science Seed Funding Program supports scientists and other experts who develop citizen science projects and expand the use of citizen science techniques. Twelve proposals to the program were selected.
The Rogue Worlds Project, led by Jacqueline Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History, will use NASA’s SPHEREx data to search for free-floating planets and brown dwarfs in clusters of young stars. SPHEREx maps the entire sky in near-infrared wavelengths.
Kameswara Bharadwaj Mantha of the University of Missouri will lead work on galaxy mergers. Volunteers will classify realistic mock images. Benne Holwerda of the University of Louisville will lead Overlap Zoo, which examines overlapping galaxy pairs and the dust they contain. Bernard Gaudi of the Ohio State University will lead Planet Hunters Roman, focused on finding exoplanets through gravitational microlensing.
Hyunju Connor of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center will lead Space Weather UnderGround, which deploys low-cost magnetometer arrays in Alaska. Lauren Blum of the University Of Colorado, Boulder will lead a project that turns plasma wave data into sound. Wenli Mo of the Johns Hopkins University will lead work on foreshock transients using data from NASA’s MMS mission.
Muhammad Fraz Bashir of the University of California, Los Angeles will lead IMPACT, which matches satellite particle measurements with ground-based measurements of electromagnetic waves. Gang Kai Poh of the Catholic University Of America will lead research on particle acceleration and transport. Cynthia Lopez-Portela of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County will lead work on tracking solar wind tracers. Karen Martirosyan of the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley will lead mapping of lunar iron abundance hotspots for regolith consolidation technologies.
