1,2,3,2,2,2,3,5,3,8,9,3,- 1LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing, Tucson, USA
- 2DiRAC Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
- 3Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA
- 4NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Tucson, USA
- 5University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
- 6Raw Data Speaks, Seattle, USA
- 7Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
- 8Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, USA
- 9Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
- 10University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, USA
- 11Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, D.C., USA
- *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract
Cometary activity — visible as tails or comae — offers a fleeting glimpse into the icy, volatile-rich small bodies of our solar system. Yet, despite the anticipated discovery of five million minor planets by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST; Ivezic et al. 2019; Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST Solar System Science Collaboration et al. 2021; Kurlander et al. 2025), LSST’s data products are not specifically designed to identify visible cometary activity such as tails or comae in its nightly torrent of images. Enter Rubin Comet Catchers, a new Citizen Science program designed to unlock this potential. By combining artificial intelligence with the power of human eyes, volunteers will help identify active small bodies hiding in plain sight among known asteroids, Centaurs, near-Earth objects, and beyond.
Building on the remarkable success of the Active Asteroids Citizen Science program, which discovered some 30 previously unknown active minor planets, including the first AI-discovered active asteroids and an active near-Earth object (Chandler et al. 2024a, 2024b; Sedaghat et al. 2024), Rubin Comet Catchers will extend this proven approach to LSST’s unprecedented dataset. Volunteers will inspect daily-updated images using an intuitive Zooniverse interface, supported by a machine learning pipeline that filters and prioritizes candidates. Promising discoveries will be escalated to expert review, followed by targeted archival searches and professional telescope observations to confirm activity and submit new comets to the Minor Planet Center.
In this presentation, we will introduce the Rubin Comet Catchers project, describe our AI-enhanced discovery workflow, and showcase initial results from commissioning and early LSST data. We will also highlight the scientific questions this project is uniquely positioned to address — ranging from activity occurrence rates across dynamical classes to the identification of new populations of active small bodies — and invite the global community to join us in the search.
Colin Orion Chandler, Maxwell Frissell, Naomi Morato, Jacob Kurlander, Dmitrii E. Vavilov, Chadwick Trujillo, Mario Jurić, Andrew Connolly, Clare Higgs, Chris Lintott, William Oldroyd, Nima Sedaghat, William Burris, Pedro Bernardinelli, Mark Jesus Mendoza Magbanua, Scott Sheppard, Michele Mazzucato, Milton Bosch, Tiffany Shaw-Diaz, Virgilio Gonano, Al Lamperti, José da Silva Campos, Brian Goodwin, Ivan Terentev, Charles Dukes
How to cite: Chandler, C. O., Frissell, M., Morato, N., Kurlander, J., Vavilov, D., Trujillo, C., Jurić, M., Connolly, A., Higgs, C., Lintott, C., Oldroyd, W., Sedaghat, N., Burris, W., Kueny, J., Hsieh, H., DeSpain, J., Farrell, K., Bernardinelli, P., Magbanua, M. J. M., and Sheppard, S. and the Rubin Comet Catchers: The Rubin Comet Catchers Citizen Science Project: Launch and Initial Results, EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2025, Helsinki, Finland, 7–12 Sep 2025, EPSC-DPS2025-1189, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc-dps2025-1189, 2025.
