NASA has selected 19 new citizen science proposals in 2026, a year that has already racked up numerous successes for volunteers working with the agency. The portfolio of projects ranges from the search for astronomical objects to the analysis of data from active missions, part of what the agency describes as a commitment to transparent, reproducible and intrinsically collaborative science.

One of the most notable results comes from Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, a project that recruits volunteers to scan infrared images of the sky for cold objects. According to NASA, participants in this project have now discovered most of the known brown dwarfs, celestial bodies comparable in size to a planet that never ignite hydrogen fusion in their cores.

NASA's citizen science projects rely heavily on the Zooniverse platform, which allows volunteers without specialist training to classify images, signals and other data sets from observatories and space missions. The model has become an established complement to professional research: it multiplies the number of pairs of eyes available for tasks that algorithms still cannot reliably handle, and it often speeds up the discovery of rare objects that would have gone unnoticed in automated catalogues.

The 19 proposals selected this year add to a growing list of active initiatives. The agency did not detail in the announcement the launch schedule for each project, but such calls usually open to public participation in the months following their selection, through the platforms associated with each proposal.