- Stardust@home
Stardust@home is a
citizen science project that encourages volunteers to search images for tinyinterstellar dust impacts. The project began providing data for analysis onAugust 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. [cite web|title=Dust Collector Grid With Aerogel|publisher="NASA "|url=http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/spacecraft/collector-index.html|accessdate=2006-03-08][
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 inHeidelberg, 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 . [citeweb|title=Stardust@home Update : Scanning, Testing, and Calibration Movies|url=http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/stardustathome/update_061206.html|publisher="
The Planetary Society "|accessdate=2008-07-26] 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. Unlikedistributed 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 earlierClickworkers 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.
ee also
*
Citizen science
*Clickworkers
*Crowdsourcing
*Distributed Proofreaders
*Galaxy Zoo
*SETI@home References
External links
* [http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ stardust@home]
* [http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html NASA Stardust Mission Homepage]
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