Help Stardust@Home find grains of interstellar dust in an aerogel particle collector which was returned from NASA's
Stardust space probe to Earth on January 15, 2006. Participants (who first go through web-based
training and pass a qualification test) can access a "virtual microscope" through a web page and then look for interstellar dust grains in "focus movies" (stacks of microscopic images created from the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector).
From the project website: "Finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) will be extremely difficult. Because dust detectors on the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft have detected interstellar dust streaming into the solar system, we know there should be about 45 interstellar dust impacts in the SIDC. These impacts can only be found using a high-magnification microscope with a field of view smaller than a grain of salt. But the aerogel collector that we have to search enormous by comparison, about a tenth of a square meter (about a square foot) in size. The job is roughly equivalent to searching for 45 ants in an entire football field, one 5cm by 5cm (2 inch by 2 inch) square at a time! More than 1.6 million individual fields of view will have to be searched to find the interstellar dust grains. We estimate that it would take more than twenty years of continuous scanning for us to search the entire collector by ourselves."
As of September 6, 2006 the project has identified several possible interstellar dust tracks. Now the project owners have to figure out the best way to
remove the tracks from the aerogel so the tracks can be examined more closely. On Septmeber 18, 2006, the
CAPTEM Stardust Oversight Committee met to decide how best to investigate the potential interstellar
dust tracks. On September 26, they decided to learn what they can from viewing the tiles from different sides, while experimenting with ways to remove the tracks using the "flight spare" tile. As of October 6, 2006, over 20 million searches have been completed by project participants, and more than 1/4 of of the aerogel collector has been scanned. As of December 1, 2006, "about 600 high-resolution focus movies of candidate extraterrestrial tracks"
have been created. The movies will be analyzed at Berkeley. As of June 8, 2007, the project is practicing extracting insterstellar
dust tracks preparing to extract actual insterstellar dust tracks. Phase 1 of the project completed successfully at the end of July, 2007. In the 11 months that phase lasted, participants analyzed over one third of the tiles and identified several dozen candidate tracks. Phase 2 began on August 10, 2007. This phase doubles the resolution of the focus movies to find even smaller candidate dust tracks.
On February 13, 2008, the first track, I1017,2, was physcially extracted from the Stardust interstellar dust collector. The particle at the end of the track is 200 microns below the surface. More information about the extraction is available in the project's
blog. Non-desctructive synchrotron x-ray fluorescence analysis of the first track was completed during the last week of February, 2008. The particle contains large amounts of iron and nickel, two elements common in extraterrestrial materials. A
status update for the results of the first 6 tracks was given on July 31, 2008. None of the tracks appear to be Interstellar.
On January 14, 2009, the project posted an Interstellar Preliminary Examination -
Update, a 10-minute narrated slide show about the ISPE and the first of a series of updates.
See an
image that shows which aerogel tiles have been scanned and which are in progress.
See the
Alpha List (login required) of the best candidate particle tracks discovered so far.
See a
live webcam view of the Stardust Cleanroom at the Johnson Space Center. See
images of comet particles retrieved from Stardust. The images were released on February 20, 2006. See a Stardust status
update published on February 21, 2006.
Join a
discussion forum about the project.