Citizen Science

What is Citizen Science?

Science is not just for specialists, science is for everyone. Every citizen can contribute to our collective knowledge of the planet and beyond. Citizen science projects actively involve citizens in scientific endeavour that generates new knowledge or understanding and have a genuine outcome.

The Institute of Space Sciences leads a citizen science project to detect fireballs across the country using observatories in more than 50 locations and pictures and videos from sky enthusiasts. In addition, we run a pilot program to study meteorites and collect micrometeorites as excuse to promote the participation of young "scientists" doing Compulsory Secundary Education (ESO).

The Spanish Meteor Network (SPMN-CSIC)

The SPMN-CSIC network is coordinated by Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez, principal investigator of the Meteorite, Minor Bodies and Planetary Sciences Group at ICE-CSIC. This 27 years old research project is based in professional-amateur collaboration (proam) and seeks to give scientific explanation to fireballs, promote new meteorite recoveries, and characterize new meteorites. In the project also participate scientists from other universities and research centers like e.g.: GEO3BCN-CSIC, UCM, UCLM, UV, and IEC, among others.

Urban micrometeorites

Searching for micrometeorites has become more and more popular, which has led to the development of citizen science projects in the field. This citizen science project, coordinated by Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez, goals to recover new micrometeorites in collaboration with Jon Larsen, who is doing pioneer scientific research on cosmic dust particles at the University of Oslo (UiO), Institute of Geosciences. Both scientists are working closely with all the foremost experts in this field worldwide, including Matthew Genge at Imperial College, London, and NASA scientists.

Outreach initiatives

Find more about the outreach activities and projects at the institute

Institute of Space Sciences
(ICE-CSIC)