Help NASA Find a Bit of Stardust

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With folding projects such as SETI@Home, volunteers are getting an unprecedented chance to help scientists with tasks that range from finding signs of extraterrestrial life to finding a cure for cancer. The latest project to harness the power of volunteers, Stardust@Home, asks them to help scientists find something more basic: some of the tiny building blocks that created everything in the universe, including us.

Back in early 1999, NASA launched Stardust, a ship whose mission it was to collect a bit of the cosmos. In January 2004, Stardust’s aerogel-based collector passed through the comet Wild-2. But during the mission, the collector was also used to get interstellar dust – tiny particles that come from distant stars. Now, after traveling in space for seven years, the Stardust mother ship dropped off the sample container in the Utah desert.

Scientists quickly retrieved the container after it came back to earth in mid-January 2006. Soon after, they began extracting the samples from the comet, which, according to the mission’s design, would all be located on one side of the collector. The interstellar dust grains on the other side of the collector, however, promised to give them a much larger problem.

Part of the problem comes from the size of interstellar dust grains – only a few microns across. According to measurements taken by dust detectors on the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft, there should be a few dozen interstellar dust grains in the Stardust collector, distributed over a surface about a foot square. To understand the scope of the task, imagine trying to find 45 ants in an area the size of a football field!

Fortunately, one of the researchers engaged in trying to find stardust took some inspiration from the SETI@Home project. Andrew Westphal, an associate director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, realized that he might be able to harness the power of thousands of volunteers, in the same way that SETI@Home’s distributed computing project benefited from the thousands of people who offered their unused CPU cycles to look for signs of extraterrestrial life in the form of radio signals. So far, more than 72,000 users have pre-registered for the project. Westphal predicts that it will take 30,000 man hours to complete.

Next: The Nature and Scope of the Project >>
 

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