Only last year, CosmoQuest was referred to as an Ex-NASA Citizen Science Project – but now that’s not true anymore because the NASA funding has returned to the tune of $11.5 Million over the next five years, as project director Pamela Gay has recently revealed during an recording of Astronomy Cast.

We already knew since last September that CosmoQuest had won the NASA grant, but only now the full details are slowly beginning to emerge. There is no official press release from CosmoQuest yet – I’ve heard that is still being worked on – but the overall funding amount of $11.5 Million is much, much more than I had originally estimated back in October based on the number of organisations that got the grants. So this is very good news and will allow CosmoQuest to go back to doing proper science instead of barely surviving on a donations-funded shoestring budget and having to worry about funding all the time.

Update: shortly after I published this post, a new article with a job offer was posted on the CosmoQuest blog.

2016 will be an awesome year for CosmoQuest and citizen science in general – it finally looks like the sad times of sequestration and underfunded science education and public outreach are finally coming to an end. And for anyone who doesn’t know what they stumbled into here, I recommend this article about the Origins of CosmoQuest on the project’s own website that explains everything!