You too can find Stardust

Information taken from
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060110/sc_space/stardusthomeprojectbringscosmicdusttoyourdesktop

At UC Berkeley Researchers are asking internet users for help to join stardust@home. Which is a project to help find small grains of interstellar dust captured by NASA's stardust probe.

Stardust was launched in 1999 and is expected to land in Utah in the early morning of January 5th. They are hoping it will be laden with cometary fragments and interstellar dust grains. The comet and dust samples are trapped within a material named aerogel which researchers will have to pore through to find the miniscule grains.

Scientists hope that these samples will shed new light on composition of distant stars as well as the origions of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago

"These will be the very first contemporary interstellar dust grains every brought back to Earth for study," said Andrew Westphal, the associate director of UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory who developed the technique NASA will use to digitally scan Stardust's aerogel packs, in a statement. "Twenty or 30 years ago, we would have hired a small army of microscopists who would have hunched over microscopes...looking for the tracks of these dust grains."

However, Westphal and his colleagues will rely on an online "virtual microscope" that will allow anyone with an Internet connection to sift through the anticipated 1.5 million aerogel images for interstellar dust tracks. Each image will cover an area smaller than a single grain of salt, researchers said. Dust grain discoverers will get to name their tiny finds

Volunteer scanners must pay close attention to aerogel images to pick out the dust tracks from false signals. They must also first pass an initial test using sample pictures, project officials said.

According to the Stardust@home plan, if two out of four volunteers claim to find a dust track the corresponding image will be sent to 100 more volunteers for verification. Should at least one-fifth of those reviewers affirm the find, the image will be kicked up to a team of UC Berkeley undergraduates trained to spot aerogel dust tracks.

"Stardust is not only the first mission to return samples from a comet, it is the first sample return mission from galaxy," Westphal said.