Stardust@home

Stardust@home logo

Stardust@home is a project that encourages volunteers to search images for tiny interstellar dust impacts.

From February to May 2000 and from August to December 2002, the Stardust spacecraft exposed its "Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector" (SIDC), a set of aerogel blocks about 0.1 m² (1 ft²) in total size, to interstellar dust. The collector media consist of 130 blocks of 1 and 3 cm thick silica-based aerogel mounted in aluminum cells. [3]

This focus movie shows what a particle track might look like. The focus movie can be viewed in the Stardust Search Tutorial using Virtual Microscope [1] These training tutorials for Stardust @ home use tracks of extraterrestrial particles that were captured in the ODCE collector on the Russian space station Mir, and tracks of submicron dust particles shot into aerogel at 20 km/sec using a Van Der Graaf dust accelerator in Heidelberg, Germany. Until the first few examples of real interstellar dust are available, we will not know how these tracks compare to the real interstellar dust tracks. They may be deeper or shallower, wider or narrower. [2]

In order to spot impacts of interstellar dust, just over 700,000 [4] individual fields of the aerogel will have to be visually inspected using large magnification . Each field, which is comprised of 40 images, will thus be termed a "focus movie." Stardust@home will try to achieve this by distributing the work among volunteers. Unlike distributed computing projects, it does not try to harness the processing power of many computers, but uses them only to distribute and present the tasks to humans. This approach is similar to the earlier Clickworkers project to find Martian craters.

Participants must pass a test to qualify to register to participate. After registering and passing the test, participants have access to the web-based "virtual microscope" which allows them to search each field for interstellar dust impacts by focusing up and down with a focus control.

As an incentive for volunteers, the first individual to discover a particular interstellar dust particle, will be allowed to name the particle.

See also

• SETI@home, a distributed computing project
• Clickworkers and Distributed Proofreaders, projects similarly relying on volunteers

External links

• stardust@home

References

• "Stardust@home". {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

• "Dust Collector Grid With Aerogel". 2006-3-8. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

• Alexander, Amir (2006-6-12). "Stardust@home Update : Scanning, Testing, and Calibration Movies" (Press release). The Planetary Society. Retrieved 2006-07-11. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)