Asteroid Zoo

Asteroid Zoo was a citizen science project run by the Zooniverse and Planetary Resources, to use volunteer classifications to find unknown asteroids using old Catalina Sky Survey data.^[3][4] The main goals of the project were to search for undiscovered asteroids in order to protect the planet by locating potentially harmful near-Earth asteroids, locate targets for future asteroid mining, study the Solar System, and study the potential uses and advantages of crowdsourcing of astronomical data analysis.^[5][6] The project was created along with the ARKYD project through Kickstarter in 2014 and was funded with around 1.5 million dollars raised.^[7]

Asteroid Zoo

Type of site	Citizen science project
Available in	English, Polish
Created by	Planetary Resources; C. Lewicki, M. Beasley, et al.[1]
URL	asteroidzoo.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Yes, but not mandatory
Launched	24 June 2014[2]
Current status	Paused

In 2016, the Asteroid Zoo community exhausted the publicly available data, and the experiment was indefinitely paused.^[8][9] Asteroid Zoo produced several scientific publications during its run.^[10]

See also

• Astronomy portal

Zooniverse projects:

• The Daily Minor Planet
• Backyard Worlds
• Disk Detective
• Galaxy Zoo
• Old Weather
• Planet Hunters
• SETILive
• The Milky Way Project