Fergie's Tech Blog

Stardust@home Launches Today

Stardust@home volunteers will look for tracks like this, which was made in the Stardust spacecraft's aerogel collector by a comet grain and extracted for study earlier this year using techniques developed at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.
Image source: Hope Ishii / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The University of California, Berkeley's Stardust@home project - a needle-in-a-haystack search for interstellar dust that's open to anyone with a computer - gets off the ground [today] (Tuesday, August 1) at 11 a.m. PDT.

The project was announced in January as NASA's Stardust spacecraft was prepared to deliver to Earth its payload of cometary and interstellar dust grains embedded in a relative ocean of aerogel detector. Almost immediately, Stardust@home drew nearly 115,000 volunteers eager to search for these interstellar motes within the millions of scans of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector that eventually will be put on the Internet.

Using a Web-based virtual microscope developed at UC Berkeley, volunteers will vie to find the fewer than 50 grains of submicroscopic interstellar dust expected to be there.

posted by Fergie @ 8/01/2006 01:46:00 PM