During the recent total solar eclipse, the citizen cate experiment demonstrated how citizen scientists (organized by astronomer matt penn) could produce impressive scientific results. On a somewhat…

This federal contract award to the Planetary Science Institute, a nonprofit research organization, is for a two-year research grant of $157,310.93 from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center. The grant will fund a project to train citizen scientists, educators, and students across the U.S. on using low-cost robotic telescopes to conduct astronomical observations and research. The research will focus on asteroid astrometry and photometry, exoplanet transits, and solar physics using data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. This project supports NASA's strategic objectives in understanding the Sun, solar activity, the solar system, and the search for life on exoplanets. The Planetary Science Institute has a history of providing research services to NASA, including data analysis, modeling, and mission support related to planetary exploration. This grant does not have a set-aside designation.

During the recent total solar eclipse, the citizen cate experiment demonstrated how citizen scientists (organized by astronomer matt penn) could produce impressive scientific results. On a somewhat smaller scale, for the past decade, the astronomy research seminar has been conducting double star astrometry research with teams of citizen scientists and high school and undergraduate students. The seminar's teams have produced over 100 published papers. This proposal extends the seminar's reach from double star astrometry to asteroid astrometry and photometry, exoplanet transits, and solar longitudinal research projects using solar dynamics observatory (SDO) data, providing citizen scientists, inspired by the total solar eclipse, an avenue for continued research. This will be accomplished through an intensive two-day in-person/online workshop that will instruct citizen scientists, educators, and students from around the U.S. How to use the large number of low-cost or free robotic telescopes to obtain their observations, and how to analyze and write up their results for publication. The institute for student astronomical research (instar) will provide postworkshop support. The proposed work would facilitate the objectives of this solicitation by training citizen scientists and undergraduate students to conduct consistent, long-term observations of the sun, STARS, and asteroids. The research sub-disciplines facilitated by this workshop directly support objectives 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6 of the 2014 NASA strategic plan. These objectives focus on understanding the sun, solar activity, and its influence on space weather at earth (objective 1.4); determining asteroid positions and rotation rates that provide information about the content and evolution of the solar system (objective 1.5); and conducting exoplanet photometry and transit timings that contributes basic information involving the search for life on planets around other STARS (objective 1.6).