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By donating your computer's idle time, you can help particle physicists study the nature of dark matter, antimatter and mass in our universe. LHC@home is a distributed computing project that helps scientists compare theories with experiments in the search for new fundamental particles. By contributing spare...
A challenge to hack one of NASA's robots in space. The NASA Robonaut Challenge tasks developers with tinkering Robonaut 2, NASA's robot that lives on the International Space Station (ISS). In this NASA Tournament Lab challenge, robotics and computer vision enthusiasts will be helping train Robonaut 2.
A competition to create innovative energy storage for lunar rovers to use during their 14-day-long lunar night. Energy storage solutions will be tested in temperatures as low as -177 Celsius and as high as 25 Celsius. Phase 2 of the competition will also expose energy storage solutions to low pressures in addition to...
NASA is asking high school students in the U.S. to research and help design new ways to protect astronauts from space radiation. As NASA begins to map out ways for humans to explore asteroids and Mars, they need to develop ways to protect astronauts from radiation during these distant travels.
Unearth secrets about Mars' climate by scouring the Martian surface for distinct features and blotches. Detecting these features helps build a knowledge-base around the wind's direction and speed on Mars. Knowing more about the wind on Mars and how it changes and evolves over time actively helps build a...
A Mars analog research program led by the Austrian Space Forum (OEWF), a volunteer space organization based in Austria. The PolAres program aims to develop strategies for human-robotic interactions in preparation for a future human-robotic Mars surface expedition. The Austrian Space Forum collaborates with...
A two-day hackathon-style event that invites people from around the world to create and collaborate on projects relevant to space exploration. The International Space Apps Challenge is a "technology development marathon", where software developers, engineers, designers and technologists from around the world...
Ever dreamed of being able to launch something into space? Through Citizens In Space, you could be one step closer to making that dream a reality. The project has an open call for experiments that could be launched on board a a CubeSat, a type of small satellite. There's room for approximately 100 of these small...
A project where you can help create a better understanding of how the Milky Way evolves over time and potentially make new unexpected scientific discoveries. The Milky Way Project aims to sort and measure our galaxy and the characteristics of its cold, dusty material that is so important to creating stars.
An effort to discover new neutron stars (massive stars that have collapsed under their own weight) and hopefully directly detect one of Albert Einstein's predictions for the first time: gravitational waves. Directly detecting these ripples in the curvature of spacetime would open up a new window on the universe...
Help search for life on another planet by analyzing potential alien signals coming from within our galaxy. SETILive is taking the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) directly to you by presenting radio frequency signals LIVE from the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) while it's pointed at stars...
A volunteer project to bring to life early manned space flight in a searchable, linkable format. In fifty years since mankind began to explore in person the universe outside our home planet, there have been many memorable moments, of beauty, of bravery, and occasionally of tragedy. For those who did not live through them it is...
A community that provides distributed computing power to aerospace research projects that might not otherwise have access to supercomputers due to financial, administrative or bureaucratic reasons. By volunteering a percentage of your computer’s unused operating power, your computer will focus on a variety of tasks from...
Help discover new exoplanets (aka extrasolar planets/planets orbiting other stars) by exploring space telescope data from NASA's Kepler mission. Planet Hunters is an online experiment that taps into the power of human pattern recognition. The data consists of brightness measurements, or "light curves", taken...
To understand different types of galaxies and how galaxies form, Galaxy Zoo: Hubble needs your help classifying images of hundreds of thousands of galaxies taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. If you're quick, you may even be the first person in history to see each of the galaxies you're asked to classify.
An open source 3D interactive world viewer created by NASA's Learning Technologies project, released in mid-2004. It is now developed by NASA staff and open source community developers. World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar...
Epsilon Aurigae is a supergiant star located 2,000 light years from Earth that mysteriously gets eclipsed every 27.1 years by an equally large unknown dark object. The event has baffled scientists since 1821, but through the Citizen Sky project, you'll make observations and analyses that could decipher this scientific puzzle!
Build and launch your own satellite into space! One of the primary missions at Interorbital is to provide satellite hardware and launch support for the experimental and commercial satellite community. Planet Earth has entered the age of the Personal Satellite with the introduction of Interorbital's TubeSat Personal...
A citizen science project around classifying high resolution images of craters and various parts of the lunar surface taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) via the Planetary Data System (PDS). From billion-year-old volcanic eruptions and curving lava channels to recent asteroid impacts, the images you...
MilkyWay@home is a distributed computing project, harnessing the power of volunteered computers to create a highly accurate 3D model of the Milky Way galaxy. The project uses data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. By...
Learn how to spot solar explosions and track them across space to Earth. Your work could make a new scientific discovery as well as give astronauts an early warning if dangerous radiation is headed their way. You'll also find out how to pinpoint comets, particle strikes and optical effects, and how to make...
Together, you and thousands of other Stardust@Home participants will find the first pristine interstellar dust particles ever brought to Earth. Nestled within the Stardust spacecraft's capsule in 2006 were precious particles collected during its dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 and something else, even rarer and no...
The Radio JOVE project is a hands-on inquiry-based educational project that allows students, teachers and the general public to learn about radio astronomy by building their own radio telescope from an inexpensive kit and/or using remote radio telescopes through the internet. Radio JOVE students and amateur...
A non-profit scientific, educational project whose objective is to bring the excitement of observing natural and man-made radio waves to high school students. Underlying this objective is the conviction that science and technology are the underpinnings of our modern society, and that only with an understanding of...
In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One...
A project that allows individuals or groups to dedicate some portion of their time to analyzing data taken with other people's telescopes. The Global Telescope Network is a network of small telescopes around the world for the purpose of supporting the science of NASA and ESA high energy astrophysics missions...
Mentoring and inquirY using NASA Data for Atmospheric and earth science for Teachers and Amateurs (MY NASA DATA) is a project to enable K-12 teachers and students, as well as citizen scientists, to explore the large volumes of data that NASA collects about the Earth from space. A main goal of the MY NASA DATA project is to remove...
Help NASA get astronauts to the Moon and Mars. Future space exploration will challenge NASA to answer many critical questions about how humans can live and work for extended missions away from Earth. Currently, researchers are working to reduce the effects of space flight on the human body. To accomplish this...
The VW is a general purpose image processing and computer vision library developed by the Autonomous Systems and Robotics (ASR) Area in the Intelligent Systems Division at the NASA Ames Research Center. VW has been publically released under the terms of the NASA Open Source Software Agreement. They are...
Open to all ages and free to attend, the Telescope Makers’ Workshop is an all-volunteer group committed to helping people build their own telescopes. Bring your interest and curiosity, and they'll provide knowledge, enthusiasm, and advice to help you complete your telescope-making projects. No experience necessary...
NASA and Arizona State University’s Mars Education Program is offering students in the U.S. the opportunity to be involved in authentic Mars research by participating in the Mars Student Imaging Project (MSIP). Teams of students in grades 5 through college sophomore level will have the opportunity to work with scientists...
A virtual laboratory for scientists and engineers to disseminate results and collaborate on research problems in health management technologies for aeronautics systems. DASHlink (Discovery in Aeronautics Systems Health) supports innovation by allowing researchers to overcome the limitations...
An open-source, photo-realistic, real-time, three-dimensional viewing of the solar system, the galaxy and the universe. Celestia is an easy to use, freely-distributed, multi-platform, open source, software package which has become a valuable tool for astronomy education. Used in homes, schools...
A NASA education program that provides unique, high quality photographs of our planet taken by middle school students. Using the web to direct a digital camera on space flights and the International Space Station, select middle schools request images based upon their classroom investigations. Teachers, school...
This project was designed to encourage students, families and interested citizens to record observations of the quality of their nighttime sky (including specific constellations - Cygnus in the Northern Hemisphere, Sagittarius in the Southern Hemisphere) and share that data with others via the GWWSC website. Interested...
A network of amateur astronomy clubs around the U.S. who hold events for the public (e.g. star parties, planetarium shows, classrooms, etc.). The Night Sky Network is a nationwide coalition that regularly shares their knowledge, time, and telescopes to bring amazing aspects of astronomy to you (it's essentially a...