[patrickyeon]

Astronomy is one of the few places amateurs still regularly make significant contributions. The Planetary Society has a grant program specifically meant to give financial support to amateurs and professionals doing work in this field.

> The world's professional sky surveys alone cannot handle the burden of finding and tracking the estimated 10 million NEOs larger than 20 meters, the size of the asteroid that hit Chelyabinsk, Russia and caused city-wide damage. That's where our Shoemaker grant winners come in. They find new NEOs, track and measure existing ones, and contribute to the field of asteroid science by determining characteristics like spin rates and whether one asteroid is actually a binary pair.

$440,000 across 62 grants to date.

https://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/neo-grants/