Projects: Stardust@home
Stardust@home Updates
February 15, 2008: Stardust@home Team Extracts First Particle Track from Stardust Collector
On the morning of Wednesday, February 13 2008, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Andrew Westphal and Dave Frank extracted the first keystone containing a particle identified by Stardust@home from the Stardust aerogel collector.
February 11, 2008: Shifting Gears at the Johnson Space Center
Preparations towards extracting interstellar dust grain candidates from the Stardust aerogel collector have shifted into high gear. In the middle of January Statrdust@home project director Andrew Westphal and team members Zack Gainsforth and Dave Frank spent a week at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, where the Stardust collectors are housed.
January 15, 2008: From Stardust@home to Hominid Fossils: Citizen Cyberscience Reshapes Research Landscape
In the beginning was SETI@home, the first large-scale volunteer computing project, launched in 1999 with seed money from The Planetary Society. Within months the project had millions of volunteers around the world joining to form the most powerful computer network ever assembled. Other projects soon followed, focused on everything from the search for large prime numbers to protein folding.
November 12, 2007: How to Steady a Vibrating arm
. . . Zack’s trials at JSC demonstrated that pico-keystones can be extracted effectively with the method developed by Westphal and the team. But they also pointed to a persistent and nagging problem: the long steel arm holding the needle tended to vibrate, which made it impossible to achieve the level of accuracy required for the task. This set off an intense month of brain-storming back in Berkeley, where the team experimented with all manner of solutions to the problem.
October 5, 2007: The Delicate Art of Extracting "Picokeystones"
All around the world these days, Dusters are training their Virtual Microscopes on the new high resolution movies, hoping to detect the telltale signs of the impact of an interstellar dust grain. In Berkeley, California, where Stardust@home is headquartered, Andrew Westphal and his team are putting the finishing touches on a smooth and successful transition to Phase 2 of the project. Increasingly, however, they are also looking ahead, preparing for the day they will be called upon to extract miniscule interstellar dust particles from the Stardust aerogel collector. Their goal is to develop a method to safely cut out any possible track from the aerogel with pinpoint precision, without damaging the potential particle or the collector tile that surrounds it.
August 30, 2007: Search for Interstellar Dust Enters New Phase
Without much fanfare, “Phase 2” of Stardust@home was launched on Friday, August 10, 2007, marking a new chapter in the ongoing search for interstellar dust particles brought to Earth by the spacecraft Stardust. With the launch of this new stage of the project, "dusters" (as project volunteers are called) are now able to search for interstellar dust particles at an unprecedented level of sensitivity.
November 8, 2006: Aerogel: The "Frozen Smoke" that Made Stardust Possible
As Stardust@home participants scan their movies through the virtual microscope, they are searching carefully for the telltale signs of interstellar dust particles. Generally, they don't give much thought to what is actually before their eyes the entire time: aerogel, that strange and wonderful material that made up Stardust's particle collectors.
July 31, 2006: Looking for a Few Good Dust-Hunters: Stardust@home Launches August 1!
The Planetary Society, in conjunction with the University of California at Berkeley, is looking for good dust-spotters to join Stardust@home, a project where internet users search for microscopic interstellar dust particles captured by NASA's Stardust spacecraft. Volunteers can begin looking for dust particles at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 1, 2006.
July 21, 2006: Interstellar Dust: The Hunt for the Building Blocks of the Universe
Light-years from any star or planet, in the vast empty stretches that separate one star from the next, space is not quite as empty as it seems. Even in those dark regions, where nothingness prevails, something, nonetheless, is.
June 12, 2006: Scanning, Testing, and Calibration Movies
Following a slow start, the scanning of the Stardust aerogel is proceeding smoothly at the Johnson Space Center (JSC). Eight out of the 130 aerogel tiles have already been scanned, and four additional tiles are now scanned every week. At this rate, scanning the entire surface of the aerogel collector should take about 30 weeks.
May 18, 2006: Steady Progress towards Launch
The Stardust@home team is working hard these days, getting ready to open the project for public participation within the coming weeks. Although things have gone somewhat slower than they had initially hoped, project director Andrew Westphal and his colleagues are nonetheless making steady progress towards the upcoming launch. Here's a sampling of the recent milestones.
April 26, 2006: scanning Begins at JSC
Friday, April 21, was a busy day for Anna Butterworth of U.C. Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory. Anna had traveled from Berkeley to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for the express purpose of setting in motion the scanning of Stardust's interstellar dust collector.
March 1, 2006: A Letter from Andrew Westphal, Stardust@home Project Director
First, we have been completely overwhelmed by the excitement surrounding the analysis of the other side of Stardust -- the first cometary samples ever returned to Earth for study. (Stardust is really two missions in one -- a sample return mission from the Kuiper Belt and a sample return mission from the Galaxy.) A critical part of the Stardust mission is so-called Preliminary Examination, a six-month period in which scientists from all of the world get samples of the cometary dust for study using a huge variety of instruments, from scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) that fit on a table-top, to synchrotrons the size of a shopping mall.
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