Citizen science occurs when data for scientific research is
collected by members of the public in a voluntary capacity.
Public participation in environmental projects, in particular,
has been described as a global phenomenon.But there is a stigma
associated with these types of projects. The data collected are
often labelled untrustworthy and biased. Research in this area
continues to show however, that data collected by what is
essentially a non-professional workforce, are comparable to
those collected by professional scientists. via Citizen science
can produce reliable data. The official name of the latest rover
we’ve sent to Mars is not Curiosity. It’s Mars Science
Laboratory. And one of the mobile lab’s primary jobs — besides
photography and interplanetary telegraphy and being, generally,
spunky — is to do the very scientific job of assessing the soil
on Mars. Curiosity has made its mission mainly to see what Mars
is made of (and how its soil varies, and whether that soil could
have once supported life). v