The Daily Minor Planet
Citizen science project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Daily Minor Planet is a citizen science project run by the Zooniverse and The Catalina Sky Survey with a funding grant from NASA, to use citizen science volunteer classifications to discover asteroids with recent data from the G96 Mount Lemmon Survey 1.52 m (60 in) cassegrain reflector telescope.[2][3][4][5] The main objective of the project is to search for undiscovered asteroids in order to protect the planet by locating potentially harmful Near-Earth asteroids.[6][7][8][9]
Type of site | Citizen science Project |
|---|---|
| Available in | English, German, French, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, Hindi, and Arabic |
| Created by | David Carson Fuls; D. C. Fuls, et al.[1] |
| URL | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/fulsdavid/the-daily-minor-planet/about/research |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Yes, not mandatory |
| Current status | Ongoing |
The main-belt asteroid 227711 Dailyminorplanet was named in honor of thousands of volunteers who have participated in this project.[10][11]
The Daily Minor Planet Zooniverse project now has two workflows of data for volunteers to analyze with the inclusion of images taken by the 2.3-meter Bok Telescope (V00) at Kitt Peak National Observatory as of March 2026.[12]
List of Notable Discoveries
| Asteroid Designation | Orbit or Family | Semi- major axis (AU) | Eccentricity of orbit | Diameter (m) | Discovery date | Refs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 VN3 | Apollo | 1.2166279 | 0.2142180 | 26.17 | 2023-11-05 | MPC · JPL |
| 2023 TW | Aten | 0.8458886 | 0.2912585 | 9.30 | 2023-10-04 | MPC · JPL |
| 2024 SN3 | Aten | 0.9150081 | 0.1096303 | 11.02 | 2024-09-22 | MPC · JPL |
| 2025 HD3 | Aten | 0.8316599 | 0.4446249 | 23.78 | 2025-04-24 | MPC · JPL |
| 2025 KU1 | Apollo | 1.0738396 | 0.0810991 | 15.10 | 2025-05-22 | MPC · JPL |
| 2026 KS3 | Amor | 1.6766994 | 0.3666147 | 62.51 | 2026-05-23 | MPC · JPL |
