Help The Stardust Project Find Particles!

[Rocker5150]

Back in January, the Stardust spacecraft came back to Earth after collecting particles from Comet Wild 2. In addition to those, there are also some which are interstellar. These are inbeded in 1000 square centimeters of aerogel, about one micron in size, and much more rare than those from the comet. This is from their website:

"If we were doing this project twenty years ago, we would have searched for the tracks through a high-magnification microscope. Because the view of the microscope is so small, we would have to move the microscope more than 1.6 million times to search the whole collector. In each field of view, you would focus up and down by hand to look for the tracks. This is so much work, that even starting twenty years ago, we would still be doing it today!"


They have about a million 'focus movies' which can be downloaded and viewed with a virtual microscope. If you find one you will get to name it, and your name will be included in any Stardust@home collaboration paper about the discovery as co-author. The top-ranked volunteers will also be invited to visit their lab in Berkeley for a special tour!

Check it out here:

Stardust@Home


This is a shot of the aerogel showing a hole that may have been caused by one of the rare particles:

Link

The description:

"What caused that hole? The hole in question appears as a small dark circle on the far right. If the above image of aerogel seems dull and uninteresting, then welcome to one aspect of real world science. The interesting part is that something created that dark hole, and it might well be one of the first pieces of matter ever captured from outside our Solar System. Whatever created that hole was captured by the aerogel of the robotic Stardust spacecraft that flew across our Solar System for years and then returned a capsule to Earth. Scientists are now pouring over the aerogel, looking to see what particles have become trapped. Many particles are surely from local Comet Wild 2, which Stardust flew past in 2004. Just a few particles, though, perhaps 10 or less, are expected to be from outside our Solar System. It is so difficult to find them that the Stardust team has created a downloadable interactive microscope program to allow anyone with a standard computer to help inspect aerogel slices and look for interstellar dust tracks. Good candidate tracks will later inspected in great detail by members of the Stardust team."


Good luck!

-Kevin

[Hawkwings]

I signed up for this and started when this came out. I got bored of it pretty quickly though. The scores are completely messed up though. 61 thousand? Yeah right.

I've gotten through about 600 movies now.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

It's a good way to kill time if one is really bored, I've found. I signed up yesterday, and have gone through 185 movies, sixty of which were test movies. Of those, I've only missed three.