CosmoQuest Citizen Science Builder Platform Issues Call for Proposals

The CosmoQuest Virtual Research Facility is pleased to announce the Cycle 1 call for proposals to use the CosmoQuest Citizen Science Builder platform. This program provides facility time and funding to support investigations requiring the aid of citizen scientists. Participation is open to all categories of domestic organizations, including educational institutions, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, NASA centers, and other government agencies.

Cycle 1 will support projects that utilize existing data or data from observations scheduled at the time of proposal submission. Data may be images, spectra, or videos. Data must be in hand and fully processed before a project may begin.

This solicitation for proposals will be open through 4 November 2016.

The CosmoQuest Virtual Research Facility solicits basic research proposals to utilize the Citizen Science Builder platform to support NASA's Science Mission Directorate-related research. Proposed investigations should utilize trained members of the public to accomplish basic research tasks, and should include a specific plan for how they will produce published research. The CosmoQuest Virtual Research Facility will provide science teams with all needed software customization, and will support selected science teams in data validation as well as in communicating project science to the citizen science community.

Citizen science is a process that utilizes everyday people in tasks that lead to publishable research. In some cases, citizen scientists are extraordinary individuals who accomplish remarkable work alone or in partnership with professional researchers. In astronomy and space science, examples include William Herschel (discovered infrared light and Uranus), Grote Reber (pioneered radio astronomy), David Levy (comet hunter), and Tim Puckett (supernova hunter). These individuals, however, aren't representative. Historically, researchers have employed large populations of researchers on distributed observation problems (e.g., variable stars with the AAVSO), distributed computing problems (e.g., SETI@Home), and citizen analysis and annotation problems (e.g., Stardust@Home). Currently, CosmoQuest is soliciting projects that fall into this last category: citizen analysis and annotation.

CosmoQuest's Citizen Science Builder platform allows images and videos to be annotated with markers, segment drawing tools, polygon drawing tools, and freeform drawing tools. These tools offer the flexibility needed to complete tasks ranging from mapping craters and their ejecta, to identifying moving objects in time-series images, to finding emission-line galaxies in collections of spectra. Each image is annotated by multiple people, and results are combined. A scientist dashboard allows authorized team scientists to prioritize the data being analyzed, to download results, and to monitor progress.

Submitted proposals will be ranked according to intellectual merit and broader community impact. Proposals should reflect adequate effort being allocated to both completing science and to communicating both planned and accomplished research. It is anticipated that at least preliminary results or catalogues will be published during the 24-month period of the grant, and if ongoing funding is needed, these preliminary results will allow further grant funds to be sought.

In order to take advantage of heliophysics interest that is ignited by the 21 August 2017 solar eclipse across the United States, priority will be given to funding at least one heliophysics-related project in this funding cycle.

For more information, see the full Cycle 1 call for proposals. Questions? Email the CosmoQuest Science Desk.