Asteroid Zoo is a citizen science 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 projects. The organization grew from the original Gal ...

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 search ...

data. The main goals of the project are 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 whose orbit brings it into proximity with Earth. By convention, a Solar System body is a NEO if its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU). ...

, locate targets for future

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

, study the solar system, and study the potential uses and advantages of people looking through the images over computers. It was created along with the ARKYD project through

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

, funded with just over 1.5 million dollars. The Asteroid Zoo community has exhausted the data that were available. With all the data examined they paused the experiment. Asteroid Zoo produced several scientific publications.All publications
(2017)

References

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

See also

References