---
title: "Active Asteroids (citizen science project)"
chunk: 1/1
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Asteroids_(citizen_science_project)"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:13:04.959539+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Active Asteroids is a NASA partner citizen science project that successfully discovered active asteroids, including main-belt comets, quasi-Hilda objects, and Jupiter family comets. The project is hosted on the Zooniverse platform and is funded by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. It uses images from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to search for tails around asteroids and other minor planets. The research team is led by Colin Orion Chandler. As of April 2024 about 8300 volunteers carried out 6.7 million classifications of 430 thousand images. At the time only 60 active asteroids were known and 16 new active objects were discovered by this project, significantly increasing the sample of known objects.
The success of the project did result in the development of Rubin Comet Catchers, a citizen science project using data by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and a similar approach as the Active Asteroids project.


== Pre-launch preparation ==
Before the team launched the project, the team gained experience with DECam and published three papers. These include detection of activity around previously known active asteroid (62412) 2000 SY178, revealing 6 years of activity on 6478 Gault and activity discovered on the centaur 2014 OG392.


== Discoveries ==

The project uses a pipeline called HARVEST, which compares metadata from astronomical image archives with the data from the Minor Planet Center and produces images at positions of minor planets. It also excludes images with no detection or images that cannot detect asteroids. Since February 2024 the team also used a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), called TailNet, to filter out bad images before they are shown to volunteers and to identify high-likely candidates. This CNN uses classification-labels made by the volunteers and is constantly improved with new classifications. One of the first discovery was made in September 2022, when the team published a paper describing that 282P/(323137) 2003 BM80 showed sustained activity over 15 months in 2021–2022. Activity was previously reported in 2012–2013 and the team analysed the orbit, finding that it is an outbursting quasi-Hilda object. The object 2010 LH15 was discovered to have cometary activity from DECam images by the Active Asteroids project. A follow-up study did find activity in images of the Zwicky Transient Facility and showed that the object had a radius of 1.11±0.02 km. The study also showed that the activity was likely due to sublimation. The activity did onset at 1.86 astronomical units (AU), which is closer than other main-belt comets. The researchers find that sublimating volatiles must be buried deeper than on other active asteroids showing sublimation.


=== List of discoveries ===


== See also ==
other citizen science projects researching minor planets:

The Daily Minor Planet Active
Asteroid Zoo inactive
Stardust@home
Catalina Outer Solar System Survey inactive
other citizen science projects

Zooniverse citizen science platform
BOINC volunteer computing platform
Planet Hunters: exoplanet discovery project
Backyard Worlds: brown dwarf discovery project


== References ==