Zooniverse, a NASA-backed citizen science platform, reached 1 billion volunteer classifications across its projects. NASA has sponsored 31 Zooniverse projects since 2020, with volunteers contributing 120 million classifications that led to 96 peer-reviewed publications, 56 of which list citizen scientists as co-authors. The platform combines human pattern recognition with data from NASA missions to discover exoplanets, near-Earth objects, brown dwarfs, and support other research goals.
NASA's Zooniverse projects span Planet Hunters TESS, Daily Minor Planet, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, and others, engaging 324,000 volunteers in active research. The platform's broader community exceeds 3 million registered users. NASA plans to leverage this volunteer workforce for upcoming datasets from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, suggesting citizen science will play a larger role in processing the space agency's future observations.