- Good afternoon, hi Marc.

- How are you doing? It's been a while.

- It has very well. Thanks for stepping in to present today.

- Thanks so much for having me.

- Well, it's exciting and we've been meaning to have a citizen science talk for a while. So this is a great opportunity and perfect to talk a bit about what you and all your collaborators are doing.

- I really enjoy this mornings talks, this afternoons talks, depending on what time zone you're in. a long way.

- It's exciting times.

- How do those slides look to you?

- Beautiful.

- Screen-sharing okay?

- Okay.

- I can hear and see your slides fine. I am actually gonna pass the microphone over to Josh Pepper, who is going to moderate this session starting in about a minute.

- Hey, Josh.

- Hey there.

- Nice to see you.

- Good to see you.

- You too, I'm stepping in to help out Mike. Who's been overseeing this entire process and production for this whole thing.

- Okay. So I will plan to give you a two minute warning, but I think we're all very excited about this and let's see, Mike, just let us know when you want us to start.

- All right, I think we're at the 3:25 mark, so to stay on schedule, we might as well go just to introduce another one of our E.C members, Josh Pepper. Known to many of you and Josh will be chairing this session. Thanks again, Josh.

- Great. Hi everyone, great talk so far. We've got another really exciting one coming up. So without further ado here is my co-chair talking about citizen science.

- Oh, Hey Josh. Thanks for having me, great to see you all. I just want to start, I just want to thank everyone for all the progress you've made during the last couple of years, it had been so difficult, really building all those tools that we need to find exoplanets and just keeping the ball moving. So stare with me for a minute at this plot, this are all the exoplanets with known radii and with periods greater than a year. Maybe you didn't realize that about a third of them were discovered by citizen science. So those are the orange dots on this plot. You know, most of these come from the famous planet hunters project, and there are a bunch of other projects, citizen science projects online now, that have been built over the last decade to study exoplanets and related topics. I'm going to tell you about those and hopefully twist your arm a little bit and encourage you to get involved. There you go. So besides that pretty good catalog of long period transiting planets, NASA citizens scientists have made a lot of other discoveries related to exoplanets. Translating planet, look should I read all these? You can read them as well. Oh heck I will just read them.

- Transiting planet in a quadruple star system. Star-forming regions called "yellowballs." "Dipper" stars. "Peter Pan" disks. Transiting, exocomets. A six-planet transiting system. The oldest white dwarf debris disk. Extreme T subdwarfs. And planetary-mass brown dwarfs. So what are these citizen science projects that are generating all of this fuss? They are defined in our NASA policies as science projects that rely on volunteers. And we require these projects to meet the same rigorous standards as any NASA science program. So in a way it's very simple. It's just the same wonderful NASA science, excellent science, competitive science that you're used to, but involving and including as many people as possible. we have 26 active projects online, many more in the works. All the active ones are at science.nasa.gov/citizenscience, 15 of these or so can be done by anyone anywhere. And you're encouraged to right now, feel free to stop listening to me, rattle on and go ahead and do some science with us. If you please just click on any of these projects and go ahead and do it and that's okay with me. So how does NASA citizen science fit into the plans? Well, we've got a lot of data at NASA and we've got a lot more arriving as we've been hearing all day long. Our archives are, are exploding in size. So our typical new NASA mission returns, gobs of data, let's say a hundred million images that's even small these days or spectra or time series. We all take our favorite computer and we attack that data best we can and our best computer algorithms are able to correctly interpret most of it. They're really good algorithm these days, but 99% of a hundred million images still leaves a lot of data that isn't correctly analyzed. So, and that data contains all the stuff that you didn't know was there. It contains, tends to contain the most interesting stuff. So you take those data that your computer was not pre-programmed to expect, and you send them out to the crowd and you take advantage of the natural curiosity of human beings to do what we all love, to do science on that really cool, large, remaining data that needs to be analyzed. And often you'll see that the citizen science projects are concluding another part of this loop here, which is that the data that's returned from citizen science is fed back into a machine learning algorithm and used to further refine our ability to analyze the data by computer. We have a growth in the number of projects, which they are sometimes called Centers, which are kind of a blend of human and machine. Another exciting place where citizen science fits in the NASA plan is that NASA now has a new value that was just added to our list of values. We officially value safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and now inclusion and citizen science of course, explicitly goes out and tries to include as many people as possible in the thrill and the rollercoaster ride of doing actual science. A bit more about our volunteers. We reach more than about 2 million of them. And if you just do the math on what fraction of people tend to have advanced degrees that works out to be about 140,000 people who probably have advanced degrees. So we've got a lot of brainpower when I first started playing with citizen science in 2011 or so my initial guess was that I'd be working with lots of kids and that would be fun for a little bit and but we wouldn't really get anything done. But the reality is that we have citizen science as a way to bring more talent into do science than we have in our community, that there are people, folks out there who have degrees in data science, law degrees. There are doctors, there are scientists from other fields who decided to join us to do some science on the weekends say and they have, they benefit NASA through curiosity and passion and talents. So let me just give you a little history of NASA's exoplanet, citizen science projects. And this is just a corner of all of NASA's citizen science portfolio, of course, but really the magic started with Planet Hunters. I'm sure you've all heard of in 2012, which discovered all of those long period exoplanets starting with capital data. This just was a record breaking project in so many ways, more than half a million people contributed to the project. One of the citizen scientists was so passionate about it. That when he passed away, he left a donation to the project in his will, Planet hunters evolved eventually into Planet Hunters Tess, which is currently active. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. Of course, it takes a while to follow up these planets that have long period orbits. So we don't yet, have the confirmed planets from planet hunters tess yet for me to plot, I'll show you those candidates that are coming in from planet hunters tess. And since planet hunters is this whole string of fun and productive citizen science projects. This detective back at world's planet nine, exoplanet explorers. I think I just saw Jessie Christiansen joining the call you can ask her more about it. Planet patrol from Veselin Kostov and upcoming is exoplanet watch, led by Rob Zellem. Planet hunters tests, here's a little video of how it works. In some ways it's very simple, but don't be fooled. You just find, you look at the transit light curve and you click where you think you're seeing your transit. But so often what happens with these projects is that you'll, the scientists who are proposing the project. They'll ask a very simple question, they'll propose a very simple task they'll ask for help with. And then as that task attracts people with its simplicity, citizen scientists will go beyond that task and they'll start asking deeper questions and they'll start reading the professional literature and let's start doing side projects. And often those side projects lead to unexpected discoveries. I would say probably half of our most exciting discoveries from NASA citizen science were serendipitous, they were proposed by citizen scientists, not by the science team. Planet hunters tests has returned more than 20 million classifications for more than 30,000 volunteers that are registered. That's an underestimate of the total number of real participants, and recently published catalogs of some more of these wonderful long period transiting exoplanets that will need follow-up. And also I'm supposed to alert you to the fact that this week at the double AAS meeting, they're supposed to be a exciting press release from this project. So keep your eyes peeled. DiskDetective.org, this is my own first four anthesis in science. It looks at images from the Y's mission and searches for well tries to rule out false positives for detection of debris disks and circumstellar disks. This project returns an interesting exoplanet relevant result, which has discovered a new class of disks called Peter Pan discs. These are disks around M-Dorf that retain their gas. So they're gas, rich Jupiter, like planet forming disks that survived for 20 to 50 million years. And that seems to be a plausible origin story for systems like track Trappist-1, which have these families of planets on circular orbits that may have been corralled by a dissipation in along live disk. Backyard worlds: planet 9, is another project using wise data in a different way to look for objects that are near the sun, nearby brown dwarfs and planets in the outer solar system. And this project is also discovering doing some interesting planet related science is discovering planetary mass objects, near the sun. So this plot shows a kind of a reduced proper motion, color diagram that plots all the different Y dwarfs and the coldest objects are on the lower right. The, the record is currently held by 0 8 5 5, for the coldest known brown dwarf. But look at that other pile of red objects, those objects are approaching 0 8 5 5 in their low temperatures and are probably planetary mass. The planet patrol's universe project led now by Veselin Kostov started out as purely a Zooniverse project, asking participants to complete a very simple task to rule out false positives and in looking at imaging data, to make sure that the centroid was moving to the right spot and that you're not looking at an eclipsing binary, but they whipped through their first batch of data. And then they went rogue. So currently the planet patrol team of citizen scientists also led by Veselin has gone off on a different track and is now doing much more sophisticated vetting using the full on Dave tool. A data analysis vetting tool, looking at Eleanor light curves. And they're trying aiming to make a uniform least vetted set of about a thousand light curves for cross-comparison of all the different light curve extraction pipelines that are on right now. So the states, and then for those results, a very surprised direction for the citizen science project.

- [Josh] Marc, we got about two minutes left.

- Great almost done, just going to advertise exoplanet watch, which asks folks with backyard telescopes to observe transiting exoplanets, and maintain their femoris. You can help that beta test, it's ongoing right now. Am I going to be remiss if I didn't mention all the wonderful exoplanet citizen science that's going on beyond NASA from the American association of variable star observers to of course, study at home. So how can you get involved? So you have an idea for a citizen science project, just dropping a little hint for ideas. We have a citizen science seed funding program, which is now in its second year, and the proposals are due in about 11 days, January 21st. Just send us a six page proposal that's all it takes. And you can get about a year of funding to launch your own citizen science project. Here are some of your helpers at headquarters. And we have a new worksheet shop series, starting on the 20th. Our next talk is going to be about anti-racism and citizen science. And of course I would love it if you would join our email list and I will send you all sorts of updates just send me a note at Marc.Kuchner@nasa.gov, and I'll put that email on the chat. And that's all, thanks everyone.

- Great, thank you very much, Marc. This is really exciting to hear about. We've got, we ended right on time. So we've got several minutes for questions. In the question session, there's a couple, there's actually one of the ones that asks about links that people can share to existing citizen science projects. I'm assuming that either you or others can put links into the Webex chat or people can just email you directly, or maybe we can put links on the XO Peg site if that's available. But I think that would be great to share.

- Sure, I'm glad to.

- All right. So there's another question that asks basically it's specifically asking you about planet hunters, but it's asking about the way the interface has been changing. And sounds like there is concern that the, as the interface changes, it can make it harder for people to stay involved and keep up with making use of that citizen science utility. Is there any efforts towards making either more stable interfaces or ways of preserving them, especially so they could be possibly used for teaching purposes for year over year with students?

- Super, was that specifically about planet hunters tests?

- That was, it sounds like that's probably primarily about Planet hunters tests.

- Looking to see any chance Nora Eisner might be online or Crystalyn someone else from their project. I can say that NASA has been, has a partnership with Zooniverse and that we're working with them to improve their platform, which serves about half of NASA projects, including planet hunters test, and many of the ones that I mentioned. And they have, they're very much thinking about teaching and making their platforms as broadly usable as possible. One of the, an example of how they're improving it is they've been making it more mobile friendly, because we find that more people these days have mobile phones and that helps us bridge the digital divide and reach audiences of lower incomes. I can help, I can put you in touch with Nora Eisner for more specifics.

- Sounds good. Okay. Let's see, I think those are the questions that we had. Let me ask also, if you mentioned something about how individual citizen scientists, you know, as they're going through the data and becoming more adept at it, some of them actually make their own sort of tangential discoveries and can sort of lead or, or plan projects on these unexpected things. Can you give us a little bit of an example of how that works and, or what's happened in the past?

- One of my favorites is Molina not as a citizen scientist who was using the backyard world's interface and she said, oh, you've been hunting for brown dwarfs? How about white dwarfs? And she went through and combed through catalogs of white dwarfs and discovered one that had a debris disk. And not only was it one that happened to have a debris disk, but it was the single oldest white dwarf for the debris disk. Other cool ones, the whole NASA citizen science has discovered most of the known comets. There's no qualifier in that sentence it's simply most of the known comments were discovered by NASA citizen scientists. And that project was essentially it started because citizen scientists were noticing the comments in SOHO data without any prompting whatsoever and started peppering Carl Bottoms with questions on want to do with those discoveries. I could keep going, but

- That sounds great. And then maybe just as a final question before we move on, can you just say something briefly about the use of the citizen science projects for educators and for teachers to involve classes?

- Absolutely. I have a resource we've collected all of the different curricula that have been created to go with NASA citizen science projects, and I can post a link to that resource for everybody. Thanks for asking.

- That'll be fantastic, yeah, that'd be great to put it in both the, the Webex link and then also the slack channel we're juggling between the interfaces. Great. Thank you so much for a great talk.