editorial All planets great and small Near- asteroid Bennu is one of a range of bodies in the Solar System to have been reached by space missions in the past months. Crowd-sourcing technologies can help with the exploration of its surface.

hose interested in the bodies of the differences (although experts were better at Solar System have had an exciting classifying them). More importantly, though, Tfew months. Missions from space low levels of consensus riddled experts’ and agencies around the world have successfully volunteers’ assessments alike. More pairs reached a diverse array of target bodies of eyes — trained in planetary sciences or large and small, near and far, more familiar not — appear to be an advantage when and newly explored. A robotic lander from searching for features on planetary surfaces. NASA, InSight, touched down on Mars in A plan is in place for OSIRIS-REx, too, to late November 2018; one from the China ask the public for help. The OSIRIS-REx team National Space Administration, C h an g’e 4 , will need to decide on a location for their landed on the farside of the in early sample return manoeuvre by the summer. January 2019. Two prospective sample- With the realization that Bennu does not have return missions designed in Japan and the the widespread surface cover of fine-grained United States, respectively, are exploring material that the sample-return technology near-Earth asteroids Ryugu1–3 and Bennu4, was originally designed for4, it will not be easy and from the outer reaches of the solar Credit: The OSIRIS-REx team, with a particular to determine the most promising spot — and system NASA’s New Horizons mission is thanks to the Altimetry Working Group there are vast amounts of data to look at. sending intriguing images of the Kuiper belt This is where crowd-sourcing can help: the object designated (486958) 2014 MU69 — a OSIRIS-REx team is working together with doublet of joined bodies that has morphed ten Nature Geoscience papers by CosmoQuest (https://cosmoquest.org/x/) in the public imagination from snowman score since January 2017 are in planetary to launch the citizen science project Bennu to a pair of pancakes, as more imagery has science. Mappers, by the middle of May. become available. With the advent of internet Outreach is important. As more and In this Issue, we are pleased to present crowdsourcing, public interaction with space more data come in from the various initial observations from one of these science is no longer limited to sitting and mission arrivals, our understanding of the endeavours, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. watching. The SETI@home project (https:// solar system will deepen. Undoubtedly, Specifically, two papers characterize the setiathome.berkeley.edu/) has allowed those new questions will arise, too. At Nature surface and shape and structure with a computer to help with the Search for Geoscience we are keen to support the of near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and an Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) since endeavour of disseminating the outcomes accompanying sketch-up illustrates Bennu’s 1999. And a variety of space-related projects of those missions, to Earth and planetary geological features and . A broader are available for volunteers to join on the scientists as well as to the public. ❐ characterization of the asteroid is revealed Zooinverse platform (https://go.nature. in a package of research papers published com/2O3985y). across the Nature journals. Involvement of the public can be Published online: 28 March 2019 Public engagement with planetary greatly beneficial to planetary science. In a https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0350-6 exploration has long been high. As early crater-counting exercise on the Moon that as the 1920s, space exploration was all compared the assessments from trained References the