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By European Space Agency
ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has provided crucial data to answer the decades-long question of where the energy comes from to heat and accelerate the solar wind. Working in tandem with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter reveals that the energy needed to help power this outflow is coming from large fluctuations in the Sun’s magnetic field.
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By NASA
5 min read
How NASA Citizen Science Fuels Future Exoplanet Research
This artist’s concept shows the exoplanet K2-33b transiting its host star. Many citizen science projects at NASA invite the public to use transit data to make discoveries about exoplanets. NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s upcoming flagship astrophysics missions, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory, will study planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Over 5,000 exoplanets have been confirmed to date — and given that scientists estimate at least one exoplanet exists for every star in the sky, the hunt has just begun. Exoplanet discoveries from Roman and the Habitable Worlds Observatory may not be made only by professional researchers, but also by interested members of the public, known as citizen scientists.
Exoplanet research has a long involvement with citizen science. NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission and now-retired Kepler mission, which are responsible for the vast majority of exoplanet discoveries to date, both made observations freely available to the public immediately after processing. This open science policy paved the way for the public to get involved with NASA’s exoplanet science.
NASA’s Planet Hunters TESS project invites the public to classify exoplanet light curves from TESS online. Another project, Exoplanet Watch, allows citizen scientists to gather data about known exoplanets, submit their observations to NASA’s public data archive, and receive credit if their observation is used in a scientific paper. Participants don’t even need their own telescope — Exoplanet Watch also curates data from robotic telescopes for users to process.
Artist’s concept of NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). Data from TESS have been used in citizen science projects. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center “Anyone across the world who has access to a smartphone or a laptop can fully participate in a lot of these citizen science efforts to help us learn more about the cosmos,” said Rob Zellem, the project lead and project scientist for Exoplanet Watch and astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
NASA’s citizen science projects have discovered several new planets from Kepler and TESS data. They have also helped scientists refine the best time to observe important targets, saving hours of precious observation time on current flagship missions like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Roman and the Habitable Worlds Observatory provide even more possibilities for citizen science. Expected to launch by May 2027, Roman will discover exoplanets through direct imaging, transits, and gravitational microlensing. Following that, the Habitable Worlds Observatory will take direct images of stars in our solar neighborhood to find potentially habitable planets and study their atmospheres.
The general public can get Roman data as quickly as I can as a scientist working on the mission.
Rob Zellem
Exoplanet Watch Project Lead and Project Scientist; Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Deputy Project Scientist for Communications
Like Kepler and TESS before them, data from Roman and the Habitable Worlds Observatory will be available to both the scientific community and the public immediately after processing. With Roman’s surveys expected to deliver a terabyte of data to Earth every day — over 17 times as much as Webb — there is a huge opportunity for the public to help sift through the information.
“The general public can get Roman data as quickly as I can as a scientist working on the mission,” said Zellem, who also serves as Roman’s deputy project scientist for communications at NASA Goddard. “It truly makes Roman a mission for everyone and anyone.”
Although the Habitable Worlds Observatory’s full capabilities and instrumentation have yet to be finalized, the inclusion of citizen science is expected to continue. The team behind the mission is embracing a community-oriented planning approach by opening up working groups to volunteers who want to contribute.
“It’s already setting the tone for open science with the Habitable Worlds Observatory,” said Megan Ansdell, the program scientist for the mission at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The process is as open as possible, and these working groups are open to anybody in the world who wants to join.” There are already over 1,000 community working group members participating, some of whom are citizen scientists.
The Roman Coronagraph, photographed during testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Southern California, is a technology demonstration designed to block starlight and allow scientists to see the faint light from planets outside our solar system. It represents one of multiple ways that Roman will contribute to exoplanet research. NASA/JPL-Caltech Future citizen science initiatives may be combined with cutting-edge tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) for greater efficacy. “AI can be exceptionally powerful in terms of classification and identifying anomalous things,” said Joshua Pepper, the deputy program scientist for the Habitable Worlds Observatory at NASA Headquarters. “But the evaluation of what those anomalous things are often requires human insight, intervention, and review, and I think that could be a really fantastic area for citizen scientists to participate.”
Before Roman and the Habitable Worlds Observatory launch, exoplanet citizen scientists still have plenty of data to analyze from the Kepler and TESS satellites, but the contributions of the community will become even more important when data begin pouring in from the new missions. As Zellem said, “We’re in a golden age of exoplanet science right now.”
NASA’s citizen science projects are collaborations between scientists and interested members of the public and do not require U.S. citizenship. Through these collaborations, volunteers (known as citizen scientists) have helped make thousands of important scientific discoveries. To get involved with a project, visit NASA’s Citizen Science page.
By Lauren Leese
Web Content Strategist for the Office of the Chief Science Data Officer
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Last Updated Aug 08, 2024 Related Terms
Citizen Science Exoplanets Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Open Science Explore More
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By NASA
Daily global average temperature values from MERRA-2 for the years 1980-2022 are shown in white, values for the year 2023 are shown in pink, and values from 2024 through June are shown in red. Daily global temperature values from July 1-July 23, 2024, from GEOS-FP are shown in purple. NASA/Global Modeling and Assimilation Office/Peter Jacobs July 22, 2024, was the hottest day on record, according to a NASA analysis of global daily temperature data. July 21 and 23 of this year also exceeded the previous daily record, set in July 2023. These record-breaking temperatures are part of a long-term warming trend driven by human activities, primarily the emission of greenhouse gases. As part of its mission to expand our understanding of Earth, NASA collects critical long-term observations of our changing planet.
“In a year that has been the hottest on record to date, these past two weeks have been particularly brutal,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Through our over two dozen Earth-observing satellites and over 60 years of data, NASA is providing critical analyses of how our planet is changing and how local communities can prepare, adapt, and stay safe. We are proud to be part of the Biden-Harris Administration efforts to protect communities from extreme heat.”
This preliminary finding comes from data analyses from Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) and Goddard Earth Observing System Forward Processing (GEOS-FP) systems, which combine millions of global observations from instruments on land, sea, air, and satellites using atmospheric models. GEOS-FP provides rapid, near-real time weather data, while the MERRA-2 climate reanalysis takes longer but ensures the use of best quality observations. These models are run by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Daily global average temperature values from MERRA-2 for the years 1980-2022 are shown in white, values for the year 2023 are shown in pink, and values from 2024 through June are shown in red. Daily global temperature values from July 1 to 23, 2024, from GEOS-FP are shown in purple. The results agree with an independent analysis from the European Union’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme. While the analyses have small differences, they show broad agreement in the change in temperature over time and hottest days.
The latest daily temperature records follow 13 months of consecutive monthly temperature records, according to scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Their analysis was based on the GISTEMP record, which uses surface instrumental data alone and provides a longer-term view of changes in global temperatures at monthly and annual resolutions going back to the late 19th century.
Media Contact:
Liz Vlock
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
elizabeth.a.vlock@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Jul 29, 2024 EditorJennifer R. MarderLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Earth Climate Change Goddard Institute for Space Studies Goddard Space Flight Center View the full article
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By European Space Agency
An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth. While there were hints that the planet existed, it had not been confirmed until Webb imaged it. The planet is one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date.
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