NASA Citizen Science

The Office of the Chief Scientist provides leadership, coordination, and agency-level strategy for NASA’s citizen science activities:

• Develops and maintains policy direction, implementation guidance, and reporting requirements for Agency citizen science activities.
• Works with the Associate Administrators from all mission directorates to encourage participation in and support of the agency’s citizen science program.
• Reserves the ability to review agency-wide requested citizen science funds in the annual budget request to ensure consistency with statutory and other external requirements.
• Works with the Associate Administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate to leverage and promote citizen science along with challenges, prize competitions, and crowdsourcing activities as appropriate.
• Reports externally on NASA citizen science as required by Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, and other external bodies.
• In coordination with the Associate Administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate, reports on citizen science and crowdsourcing activities in support of the biennial report to Congress required under Public Law Number 114-329.
• The Mission Directorate Associate Administrators, the Officials-in-Charge of Headquarters Offices, and the Directors of NASA Centers, or their designees shall be responsible for the coordination, design, scientific review, implementation, measurement and internal reporting of NASA citizen science activities.

» View NASA’s Policy regarding Citizen Science

» View a list of current citizen science projects

Digital Transformation

Information coming soon.

Researcher Demographics

NASA collects data on the demographic makeup of its research community through its NSPIRES proposal system. Users are prompted to answer questions regarding their gender, race, ethnicity, disability status, and career stage information. All information is purely voluntary. The  demographic data provide an account of NASA’s researcher community, and helps assess our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. This information can be used for strategic outreach and engagement activities by NASA’s senior leaders.

Questions about this data should be addressed to Caroline Wilson.