Join the Search for Pieces of Stardust
24 November 2005
Stardust@Home makes you the space explorer
In January 2006, the Stardust spacecraft will return to Earth carrying with it interstellar dust and materials collected from a comet. Now, scientists need your help to find some of these particles.

On the 3rd of January 2004, the Stardust spacecraft flew through the coma of comet Wild2 (Vild 2), and captured thousands of cometary dust grains in special aerogel collectors. But Stardust carries an equally important payload on the opposite side of the cometary collector: the first samples of contemporary interstellar dust ever collected. The Stardust mission is seeking volunteers to help search for these tiny samples of matter from the galaxy.

The Stardust spacecraft flew within a few hundred kilometres of Wild2 after having travelled over 2.6 billion kilometres over 5 years. Images from that close encounter were received through the antenna dishes of the Deep Space Network complex just outside of Canberra. The Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex has continued to monitor the Stardust spacecraft throughout its homeward voyage.

In January 2006, Stardust will return the first samples collected from a solid solar-system body beyond the Moon for study on Earth. As well as being the first mission to return samples from a comet, Stardust is the first sample return mission from the galaxy. But finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) will be extremely difficult.

Finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the SIDC will be extremely difficult. Because dust detectors on the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft have detected interstellar dust streaming into the solar system, scientists know there should be about 45 interstellar dust impacts in the SIDC. These impacts can only optically imaged using a high-magnification microscope, but they will be located somewhere in the collector which is about a 30cm² in size. Although this may not seem very large, for a high-power microscope it is enormous. The job is roughly equivalent to searching for 45 ants across an entire football field, one 5cm by 5cm square at a time! More than 1.6 million individual fields of view will have to searched to find the interstellar dust grains. The mission team estimates that it would take more than twenty years of continuous scanning to search the entire collector by themselves.

STARDUST NEEDS YOU!
The only way that the scientists could think of to find these exciting interstellar dust grains is to recruit talented volunteers to help in the search. Volunteers will be absolutely critical to the success of this project.

First, you will go through a web-based training session. This is not for everyone: you must pass a test to qualify to register to participate. After passing the test and registering, you will be able to download a virtual microscope (VM). The VM will automatically connect to the Stardust server and download so-called "focus movies" - stacks of images that will be collected from the SIDC using an automated microscope at the Cosmic Dust Lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

The VM will work on your computer, under your control. You will search each field for interstellar dust impacts by focusing up and down with a focus control. In many ways, it will be better than a real microscope, since it will have controls (contrast, image gradient, etc.) that real microscopes don't have. Scientists have suggested that they may also implement stereo views of the collector for those who enjoy wearing 3D glasses!

The more focus movies you examine, the better the chances are that you'll find an interstellar dust grain. But scientists have no minimum expectation - you should search through focus movies as long as you're having fun doing it. Just remember that you are looking at the first collector that has gone into deep space, beyond the orbit of Mars, and come back.

The Stardust@home website will include a list of top participants.

There is a tradition in the scientific community of naming some individual interplanetary dust particles (for example, "Florian", "Benavente"). The discoverer of each individual interstellar dust grain will have the privilege of naming it. Also, in recognition of the critical importance of the Stardust@home volunteers, the discoverer will appear as a co-author on the paper announcing the discovery of the particle.

This is a very special opportunity to help make real deep space discoveries!

For more information on joining the search, go to: Stardust@Home
or visit the Stardust mission website at: Stardust at JPL

Article compiled from data on the Stardust@Home website.