Washington – Computer users are being invited to join the hunt for minute grains of star dust that a NASA spacecraft should return to Earth this weekend.
The Stardust spacecraft should land in Utah early Sunday, carrying in its hold a sprinkling of grains of interstellar dust scooped up during its seven-year mission. Researchers are seeking the public’s help in pinpointing the submicroscopic bits of dust, leftovers from stellar explosions perhaps millions of years old, in photos they plan to place on the Web.
Researchers should begin posting in March the first of an anticipated 1.5 million microscopic images of the collector plate that Stardust used to snag the dust grains while it orbited our sun.
The hope is that keen-eyed participants in the Stardust@home project can expedite the search for the estimated 45 interstellar dust grains Stardust is expected to have captured by helping sift through the hundreds of thousands of pictures of the roughly square-foot collector plate.
Users will have to prove their mettle before they are allowed to participate in the search. That includes undergoing some Web-based training, passing a test and registering before being allowed to use the virtual “microscope,” said the University of California, Berkeley, researchers behind the project said. The website is stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu.
They unveiled the project Tuesday at the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. They expect they will need 30,000 person-hours to comb through all the images at least four times.
Each picture will cover an area smaller than a grain of salt.
