Active Asteroids (citizen science project)

Active Asteroids
Type of site
Citizen science project
Available inEnglish
URLwww.zooniverse.org/projects/orionnau/active-asteroids
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
Launched31 August 2021;
3 years ago (2021-08-31)
Current statusOnline

Active Asteroids is a NASA partner citizen science project that successfully discovered active asteroids, including main-belt comets, quasi-Hilda objects, and Jupiter family comets. The project is hosted on the Zooniverse platform and is funded by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. It uses images from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to search for tails around asteroids and other minor planets. The research team is lead by Colin Orion Chandler.[1][2][3] As of April 2024 about 8300 volunteers carried out 6.7 million classifications of 430 thousand images. At the time only 60 active asteroids were known and 16 new active objects were discovered by this project, significantly increasing the sample of known objects.[2]

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  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Chandler2024b was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Chandler2022b was invoked but never defined (see the help page).