Work on real physics and space research, alongside the people doing it.

Rakiura is a research-participation program where technically curious people work on open problems in physics, inside working research labs, alongside the scientists who own the questions.

Apply to Rakiura

Who we are

There are more people ready to do research than there are seats to do it in. Every lab we work with has open questions and not enough people to answer them.

Doctorates leave academia and never publish again. Engineers and analysts carry scientific questions for decades without a way to pursue them. In much of the world there is no lab within reach at all.

Rakiura closes that gap. Labs open real strands of their research to our community, and members work on them with the lab's data, tools, and supervision. The output is ordinary research output: papers, software, datasets, analysis, and the documentation that lets the next person continue.

Our mission

Make it possible to contribute to science and to be a scientist, regardless of background. We connect labs that have more questions than capacity with people who have the ability and the will to work on them.

Our vision

We are building Rakiura to be mission locked, with incentives that point the same direction as the scientists and the members working with them. We take no advertising, because advertising changes what a platform optimises for. Every decision we make, from the labs we bring on to the product we build, is meant to put more people to work on real science.

What we stand for

Access by capability

We will not replicate the university's habit of raising the bar to keep people out. What determines whether you belong here is whether you can do the work, not which institution is willing to have you.

Cost is never the barrier

Ability to contribute and ability to pay have nothing to do with each other. We work to keep a place open for people who can do the work, whatever their circumstances.

Progress you can point to

No leaderboards and no rankings. You advance by what you deliver and by what other researchers come to rely on, which is how a research career has always actually worked.

The actual work

You join live research with its uncertainty intact, including the dead ends and the parts nobody has figured out yet. This is not simplified outreach built for an audience.

Labs on Rakiura

Morning Star Missions to Venus

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Morningstar Missions is searching the clouds of Venus for signs of life, based at MIT in partnership with Rocket Lab.

Gravitational Wave Paleontology Lab

University of California San Diego

Reconstructing the lives of massive stars across cosmic time through their black-hole fossils.

Limits of Habitability

Stanford University

An exoplanet astrophysics group asking what makes a world habitable, and how small a planet can hold liquid water.

Project Starshade

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A NASA concept using a giant flower-shaped screen to block starlight and directly image Earth-like exoplanets and their atmospheres.

The team

Researchers

Floor BroekgaardenGravitational Wave Paleontology Lab, UC San DiegoFloor Broekgaarden is an assistant professor of astronomy at UC San Diego, where she works at the intersection of data science, statistics, and astrophysics, and leads the research group building the field of gravitational-wave paleontology. Her work reconstructs the lives and deaths of massive stars across cosmic time from the black hole and neutron star mergers they leave behind.

Sara SeagerMorning Star Missions to Venus and Project Starshade, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologySara Seager is a professor of planetary science, physics, and aerospace engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for her work on the atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system. Her research now spans the search for signs of life in the clouds of Venus and the starshade technology that could let us image an Earth-like planet directly.

Michelle HillLimits of Habitability, Stanford UniversityMichelle Hill is a planetary scientist at Stanford whose work asks how small a planet can be and still hold on to an atmosphere. She developed the Smaller Than Earth Habitability Model, published in the Planetary Science Journal, which helps narrow the search for potentially habitable worlds to those meeting a minimum size.

Storytelling and communications

Ania LiuScience communicatorAnia Liu is the science communicator for the GW Paleontology lab, connecting gravitational-wave astrophysics research with the public.

Paul DalbaAstronomerPaul Dalba is an exoplanet astronomer who works with Rakiura on storytelling and awareness, and is the audio host and narrator for the Morningstar Missions to Venus podcast.

Shreejaya KaranthaWriterShreejaya Karantha is a science writer specializing in astronomy, from the Sun and planetary science to stellar evolution, black holes, and early-universe cosmology. Based in India, she writes and researches for The Secrets of the Universe, creating scripts for research-based and explainer videos, and holds a master's in physics with a specialization in astrophysics.

Where this path leads

The science you do is yours. What comes out is ordinary research output: papers, software, datasets, analysis. It is verified, credited, and builds a public research profile you keep, with a path to co-authorship. The researchers you worked with will vouch for it.