Asteroid Zoo was a

citizen science The term citizen science (synonymous to terms like community science, crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, participatory monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is research conducted with participation from the general public, or am ...

project run by the

Zooniverse Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful Citizen science, citizen science projects. The organization grew from ...

and

Planetary Resources Planetary Resources, Inc., formerly known as Arkyd Astronautics, was an American company that was formed on 1 January 2009,ARKYD Astronautics Founded http://www.planetaryresources.com/2009/01/draft-arkyd-astronautics-founded/ and reorganized an ...

, to use volunteer classifications to find unknown asteroids using old

Catalina Sky Survey Catalina Sky Survey (CSS; obs. code: 703) is an astronomical survey to discover comets and asteroids. It is conducted at the Steward Observatory's Catalina Station, located near Tucson, Arizona, in the United States. CSS focuses on the searc ...

data. The main goals of the project were to search for undiscovered asteroids in order to protect the planet by locating potentially harmful

near-Earth asteroids A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body orbiting the Sun whose closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 times the Earth–Sun distance (astronomical unit, AU). This definition applies to the object's orbit aro ...

, locate targets for future

asteroid mining Asteroid mining is the hypothetical extractivism, extraction of materials from asteroids and other minor planets, including near-Earth objects. Notable asteroid mining challenges include the high cost of spaceflight, unreliable identification ...

, study the

Solar System The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Sola ...

, and study the potential uses and advantages of

crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...

of astronomical data analysis. The project was created along with the ARKYD project through

Kickstarter Kickstarter, PBC is an American Benefit corporation, public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York City, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative project ...

in 2014 and was funded with around 1.5 million dollars raised. In 2016, the Asteroid Zoo community exhausted the publicly available data, and the experiment was indefinitely paused. Asteroid Zoo produced several scientific publications during its run.All publications
(2017)

References

Astronomy websites Astronomy projects Human-based computation Citizen science Internet properties established in 2014 {{astronomy-stub

See also

References