Stardust@home



Stardust@home is a project that encourages volunteers to search images for tiny interstellar dust impacts. The project began providing data for analysis on August 1, 2006.

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. 

[[Image:Focus movie.gif|thumb|400px|This focus movie shows what a particle track in the stardust aerogel might look like. The focus movie can be viewed in the Stardust Search Tutorial with the "virtual microscope."

The tutorials use tracks of extraterrestrial particles that were captured in the ODCE collector on the Russian space station Mir and tracks of submicrometre dust particles shot into aerogel at 20 km/s using a Van Der Graaf dust accelerator in Heidelberg, Germany. Real interstellar dust tracks may appear different from these. They may be deeper or shallower, wider or narrower.  ]] In order to spot impacts of interstellar dust, just over 700,000 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. It 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, Stardust@home will allow the first individual to discover a particular interstellar dust particle to name it. Also, the discoverer will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper announcing the discovery of the particle.