Zooniverse, a NASA grantee that runs the world’s largest platform for human-powered online research, has reached an extraordinary milestone: one billion rankings contributed by volunteers around the world. This milestone is a celebration of everyone who has marked a dip in a light curve, confirmed the presence of a moving object in a short video, or identified species in a camera trap image. Each of these small contributions together advances our understanding of the universe.

A total of 31 NASA-sponsored citizen science projects have been hosted on Zooniverse, representing 120 million classifications made by 324,000 volunteers since 2020. Through projects such as Planet Hunters TESS, Daily Minor Planet, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, Space Umbrella and Snapshot Wisconsin, volunteers help discover exoplanets, identify near-Earth objects and asteroids, search for brown dwarfs and planetary systems, analyze the effects of wind solar, and inform wildlife management decisions. These projects have resulted in 96 scientific publications, and 56 of these articles have NASA citizen scientists as co-authors to recognize the importance of their contributions to research. These efforts demonstrate how public participation can accelerate discovery by combining human curiosity and pattern recognition with data from NASA missions and observatories. Collaboration between volunteers, scientists, and IT will be even more important in the future as we tackle huge, complex data sets, like those from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

“A billion classifications represent much more than a number; they are a billion moments of curiosity transformed into meaningful contributions to research,” said Laura Trouille, Zooniverse principal investigator and vice president of Scientific Engagement at Adler Planetarium. “Each ranking in Zooniverse brings us one step closer to new discoveries and a deeper understanding of our universe, our world and ourselves.”

Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for people-powered research. Co-founded by the Adler Planetarium and the University of Oxford, with the University of Minnesota as a key institutional partner, Zooniverse enables anyone, anywhere to directly contribute to real-world scientific research. Through its six-year collaboration with NASA, Zooniverse provides scientific infrastructure to NASA researchers through tools and a community of more than 3 million registered volunteers.