Stardust@Home: Search For Cosmic Dust

Rob Updegrove 11 Jan, 2006 at 8:31am ET Article published in Tech

The UC Berkeley sponsored Stardust@Home project allows participants to search for grains of interstellar dust among the items captured by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft. Unlike traditional distributed computing projects, however, Stardust@Home requires participants to use their own eyes in order to solve the problem.

The Web-based virtual microscope will be made available to the public in mid-March, even before all the scans have been completed in a cleanroom at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. In all, Westphal expects to need some 30,000 person hours to look through the scanned images at least four times. Searching each picture should take just a few seconds, but the close attention required as the viewer repeatedly focuses up and down through image after image will probably limit the number a person can scan in one sitting.

Source: UC Berkeley

Comments

11 Jan 2006 ~ 12:23pm profdlp Interstellar dust, eh?

in·ter·stel·lar
adj.

Between or among the stars.

I found piles of it between Sol and Alpha Centauri - right here in my office. Do I get teh prize?
11 Jan 2006 ~ 12:30pm GHoosdum I beieve the gist of it is that the probe was intending to capture dust from a comet's trail. Some dust that had travelled into our solar system from between the stars had gotten trapped as well, and this project is an attempt to sort it out.

But on the face of it, it does seem funny that we're searching for something interstellar right here at home.
11 Jan 2006 ~ 1:17pm lemonlime I'm guessing you can fold while this runs too so 'search away!'
11 Jan 2006 ~ 1:18pm RWB Sweet Jebus! Count me in just for the cool factor
11 Jan 2006 ~ 2:21pm I must say I just don't get it. Its dust for pity sake.
Something we vacuume up in our homes every day and throw in the garbage.

To think they were given money to take 1.5 million pictures of an area 16 inches in diameter just to find 45 grains of dust, boggles my mind.
What they expect to do with 45 grains of dust...build a sandcastle?

I know the stalwarts are going to tell me that it holds clues to the deep dark secrets of the universe, but our planet is so messed up, the funds they are (in my opinion) wasting on this project could be put to better use right here at home.
13 Jan 2006 ~ 6:47am Mt_Goat With billions and billions of stars in millions of galaxies there is stardust all around us. There is even stardust in all of us. Look at Ziggy Srardust and the spiders from Mars.