Citizen science means ordinary people, with no special training, helping professional researchers by classifying images, listening to data or collecting measurements. NASA announced the picks on October 28, 2026, and said one of them, Overlap Zoo, is already open to volunteers.

Twelve seed-funded projects, from rogue planets to Moon iron

The Citizen Science Seed Funding Program pays scientists to build projects and to bring more professionals into the method. In astrophysics, four were chosen. Jacqueline Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History leads the Rogue Worlds Project, which asks volunteers to look through data from NASA’s SPHEREx observatory for free-floating planets and brown dwarfs (objects between planets and stars in size) in young star clusters. SPHEREx is mapping the entire sky in near-infrared light.

Bernard Gaudi of Ohio State University leads Planet Hunters Roman. It will have volunteers spot exoplanets in Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope data by the way their gravity bends starlight, a technique called microlensing. The other two astrophysics projects study galaxy mergers (Kameswara Bharadwaj Mantha, University of Missouri) and galaxies whose dust shows up when one overlaps another (Benne Holwerda, University of Louisville, the Overlap Zoo).

Heliophysics, the study of the Sun and its effects on space near Earth, gets six projects. They include a sonification effort led by Lauren Blum at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in which volunteers listen to plasma-wave data turned into sound. Wenli Mo of Johns Hopkins University leads a search of MMS (Magnetospheric Multiscale) data for foreshock transients, which NASA describes as having a critical but poorly understood role in space weather. Hyunju Connor of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center leads a low-cost magnetometer array that volunteers in Alaska will set up and monitor. Anyone who follows northern lights tonight forecasts is watching the same solar wind these projects study.

In planetary science, Karen Martirosyan of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley will ask volunteers to locate iron deposits in data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, to help plan future lunar construction. Ariel Graykowski of the SETI Institute proposes a worldwide network of citizen scientists, each with a standardized small telescope, to follow up comet outbursts and small moving bodies. NASA says the project will also build systems to process the images automatically and send alerts to the network.

Seven education teams, including a bigger Sungrazer

The Science Activation Program funds teams that connect communities to NASA science. Seven teams in this round will involve learners directly in citizen science, and several others plan to add citizen or community science to their work.

Sungrazer 2.0, led by MaryKay Severino of the ARISA Lab with Karl Battams of the Naval Research Laboratory as science lead, extends a project begun in 2006. Its volunteers have identified 5,204 comets, the majority of known comets, in images from the SOHO and STEREO solar missions. Other selections include 22 robotic telescopes opened to the public through the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, a ham radio ionosphere network led by the University of Scranton, lake-level monitoring to check data from the SWOT satellite, and Antarctic and Arctic projects using NASA satellite data.

Volunteers as the answer to a data flood

The selections fit a pattern of surveys producing more data than professionals can inspect by eye. NASA lists earlier award rounds in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and November 2025, so this is the sixth round it points to, and the topics have moved from classifying archive images toward live missions such as SPHEREx and Roman and toward hardware in volunteers’ hands.

The telescope network is the clearest example. As we reported, the Rubin Observatory has flagged a possible dwarf planet beyond Pluto, up to 1,500 km across. Professional surveys like Rubin find objects but cannot watch every one continuously, which is the gap NASA says amateurs, spread across the globe and observing at twilight, can fill. Planetary defense has a similar need: NASA’s NEO Surveyor, whose sunshade now carries 864 solar cells, is meant to find near-Earth asteroids, and follow-up observations are what refine their orbits.

NASA frames the broader year as one of success for volunteers. It says the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have found most of the known brown dwarfs, and that the Zooniverse platform, which NASA funds in part, has reached 1 billion classifications. NASA’s page lists nine projects that launched in 2026, including Galaxy Zoo: Tidal Tails, Artifact Inspector, CoCoRaHS and Overlap Zoo.

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From a July 2025 discovery to a closest pass in December

The NASA-funded ATLAS survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, first reported the object to the Minor Planet Center on July 1, 2025. Archived images from ATLAS and from Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility showed it as early as June 14, 2025. It is the third interstellar object known, after 1I/’Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, which is where the “3” in its name comes from.

NASA’s facts page puts the comet’s speed at about 137,000 mph (221,000 km/h) when it was found, still inside Jupiter’s orbit. Gravity from the Sun raised that to about 153,000 mph (246,000 km/h) at perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, on Oct. 30, 2025, when it was about 130 million miles (210 million km) from the Sun, just inside Mars’s orbit. Its closest approach to Earth came on Dec. 19, 2025, at about 1.8 au, or 170 million miles (270 million km). NASA states there was no danger to Earth.

The comet’s path is hyperbolic, which means it is moving too fast to be bound by the Sun, and NASA says it is leaving at the same speed it arrived.

A fleet of spacecraft watched one comet

NASA lists observations from an unusually wide set of instruments. Hubble imaged the comet on July 21, 2025, from about 277 million miles away, and again on Nov. 30, 2025. Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph observed it on Aug. 6, 2025. Mars orbiters and rovers took part too: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera imaged it on Oct. 2, 2025, from about 18.6 million miles away, and the Perseverance rover photographed it on Oct. 4. NASA’s Europa Clipper used its ultraviolet spectrograph on Nov. 6, 2025, and Parker Solar Probe imaged it near the Sun between Oct. 15 and Nov. 5.

NASA says the SPHEREx space telescope recorded infrared light from dust, water, organic molecules and carbon dioxide in the coma, the cloud of gas and dust around the nucleus, during a December 2025 campaign. MAVEN found hydrogen atoms around the comet, and TESS observed it in January 2026 to study its activity and rotation.

Methane, carbon dioxide and a nucleus about 1.3 km in radius

Two peer-reviewed results sharpen the picture. In a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (volume 1001, L11, published April 8, 2026), Matthew Belyakov and colleagues used Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument on Dec. 15-16 and Dec. 27, 2025, when the comet was 2.20 and 2.54 au from the Sun. They report fluorescence from water, carbon dioxide, methane and atomic nickel, and describe the result as the first direct detection of methane in an interstellar object.

The team found the CO2 to water ratio strongly enhanced compared with typical solar system comets, and the methane to water ratio somewhat enriched. Overall outgassing fell significantly over the 12 days between the two epochs, with water dropping more steeply than the other gases. The authors interpret the methane as coming from unprocessed material below the surface, after the outer layers had lost theirs earlier.

On size, a paper by Man-To Hui, David Jewitt and colleagues, accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, used Hubble images from December 2025 to January 2026 to detect the nucleus itself. Assuming a comet-like albedo (the share of light a surface reflects) of 0.04, they derive an effective radius of about 1.3 plus or minus 0.2 km. That sits inside the earlier NASA bounds of 440 meters to 5.6 km for the nucleus diameter, set from Hubble data of Aug. 20, 2025.

What the data still cannot settle

The size depends on an assumed albedo. The team’s measured quantity is the product of albedo and cross-section, about 0.22 plus or minus 0.07 square kilometers, so a different surface reflectivity would change the radius. The same paper reports that, if brightness changes come only from rotation, the nucleus must be elongated by at least 2:1, with a rotation period of about an hour or more.

The Hubble team also found that the comet faded faster after perihelion than it brightened beforehand, with an activity index of 4.5 plus or minus 0.3. Webb’s chemistry is likewise based on two observing dates, so how representative the methane ratios are of the whole nucleus is not known. NASA’s page says the comet formed in another star system and has drifted for “millions or even billions of years”, and gives no more precise age.

Hui and colleagues also infer that interstellar objects like this one probably went unseen before ‘Oumuamua was found, unless the population has a steep size distribution. That is a statistical inference from discovery numbers, not a measured census.

A comet with no return date

NASA says the comet began moving away from the Sun in December 2025 and will leave the solar system permanently, and its hyperbolic orbit means it will not come back. No further close approaches are scheduled. The remaining science will come from the archived data, which is why papers on the observations from late 2025 and early 2026 are still appearing.

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