Finding a
piece of the cosmos may be as easy as logging onto the Internet for amateur
sleuths bent on aiding NASA's Stardust mission.
Researchers
at the University of California, Berkeley are calling on computer users to join
the Stardust@home project and help find tiny grains of interstellar dust captured
by NASA's Stardust probe.
Launched in
1999, Stardust
is expected to send a sample container laden with cometary fragments and interstellar
dust grains down to a Utah desert landing site in the early morning hours of
Jan. 15. The comet and dust samples are locked within a wispy material dubbed aerogel,
which researchers will have to pore through to find the miniscule grains.
Scientists
hope the comet and dust samples, ancient material in its own right, will shed
new light on composition of distant stars and the origin 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."
Today,
however, Westphal and his colleagues will rely on an online "virtual microscope"
that allows 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.
Stardust@home
is reminiscent of the UC Berkeley-based SETI@home
effort and others that rely on volunteers to aid in a larger data analysis project.
But while SETI@home
allowed computer users to participate
in the search of extraterrestrial intelligent life by downloading a screensaver
that sifted through myriads of radio signals, the Stardust@home project - which
is set to begin in mid-March - is a bit more hands-on and comes with a bonus:
Dust grain discoverers will get to name their tiny finds.
Volunteer
scanners must pay close attention to aerogel images to pick out dust tracks
from false signals. and must first pass an initial test using sample pictures,
project officials said.
"We will
throw in some calibration images that allow us to measure a volunteer's
efficiency," Westphal said.
Westphal
estimates that some 30,000 man-hours will be required to go through each image
from Stardust's aerogel sample return capsule four times.
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.
Researchers
at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where Stardust's sample return
canister will be sent after landing, will remove the grains once they are
identified using specially developed microtweezers and micro-pickle forks,
project officials said.
"Stardust
is not only the first mission to return samples from a comet, it is the first
sample return mission from galaxy," Westphal said.
Click here for more information on
UC Berkeley's Stardust@home project.
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