• PROJECTS
  • Advocacy and Education
  • Extrasolar Planets
  • Innovative Technologies
    • LIFE Experiment: Phobos
    • Pioneer Anomaly
    • Planetary Microphones
    • SETI Optical Telescope
    • SETI@home
    • Solar Sailing
    • Stardust@home
      • Updates
      • FAQs
      • Story
  • International Mission Participation
  • Mars Exploration
  • Near Earth Objects
  • Search for Extraterrestrial Life
  • Past Projects
• THE PLANETARY REPORT
• PLANETARY RADIO
• BLOG
• SOCIETY UPDATES

browse projects: Apophis Mission Design Competition Asteroid Impact Mapping System Catalog of Exoplanets Drive a Mars Rover Extrasolar Planets Transit Search International Lunar Decade International Year of Astronomy 2009 LIFE Experiment: Phobos Mars Climate Sounder Team Website Messages from Earth Observing Earth Pioneer Anomaly Planetary Microphones S.O.S: Save Our Science! SETI Optical Telescope SETI Radio Searches SETI@home Shoemaker NEO Grants Solar Sailing Space Advocacy Space Information Stardust@home Target Earth Visions of Mars

browse space topics: 2001 Mars Odyssey Asteroids and Comets Cassini-Huygens Chandra X-Ray Observatory Chandrayaan-1 Chang'e 1 Compare the Planets Dawn Deep Impact Earth Extrasolar Planets Genesis Hayabusa (MUSES-C) Hubble Space Telescope Jupiter Kaguya (SELENE) Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Mars Mars Exploration Rovers Mars Express Mars Global Surveyor Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Science Laboratory Mercury MESSENGER Moon Near Earth Objects Neptune New Horizons New Horizons Digital Time Capsule Past Missions Phoenix Planetary Analogs Planetary Exploration Timelines Planetfest 2008 Pluto and Charon Pluto Top Ten Postcards from Venus Private Missions Rosetta Saturn Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence SMART-1 SOHO Space Imaging Spitzer Space Telescope Stardust Trans-Neptunian Objects Ulysses Uranus Venus Venus Express Voyager Weekly Planetary Radio Trivia Contest

Projects: Stardust@home

A Letter from Andrew Westphal, Project Director

1 March, 2006

Dear Stardust@home Participant:

First, we sincerely apologize that we are not able to make data available on our original timetable. We know that some of you, particularly teachers, have made plans based on this schedule. If this delay presents a problem for you, we'd like to help.

Since we made our original schedule, two things have happened.

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.

The clock started ticking as soon as the capsule touched down in Utah. Six months sounds like a long time, but it is in fact incredibly short for the kind of detailed and time-consuming study that's necessary for understanding even the most basic things about the cometary samples. We have an important role in the preparation of samples, like the "keystone" below, for our colleagues all over the world. This has been an incredible experience, and we have been making exciting and unexpected discoveries. We wish that we could share them with you right now, but the collaboration has an embargo on the discoveries until they are published in peer-reviewed journals. This is necessary to make sure that we get it right!

The search for interstellar dust is just as important as the analysis of the cometary dust, but since everyone expected that the search for interstellar dust would take years, there is no official Preliminary Examination period for this. So the cometary dust work had to take priority.

Second, we were completely overwhelmed with the response to Stardust@home. More than 100,000 people worldwide have pre-registered to participate in the search for the first contemporary interstellar dust particles ever returned to earth for study. This is fantastic news, but with it comes a challenge: our data pipe at U. C. Berkeley is not nearly big enough to handle the traffic, and we have had to scramble to figure out what to do. We have a solution, we think, that we will be testing very soon.

Click to enlarge > Stardust particle A mote of comet dust embedded in a tiny wedge of aerogel extracted from the Stardust aerogel collector. The comet dust was extracted by UC Berkeley researcher Christopher Snead. The grain of dust entered the aerogel from the lower right at supersonic speed and moved to the upper left, where it can be seen as a bright dot at the end of the carrot-shaped trail. The large oval cavity at lower right was blown out by shock waves created as the grain exceeded the sound barrier in the aerogel. At right is a micromachined fixture developed by UC Berkeley physicists, in collaboration with Chris Keller of MEMS Precision Instruments, to extract grains of comet and interstellar dust from the detectors. Led by UC Berkeley research physicist Andrew Westphal, a team at the campus's Space Sciences Laboratory also developed the device – a glass needle attached to a robotically-controlled micromanipulator – to cut out the wedge-shaped piece of aerogel from a larger aerogel tile. The aerogel-embedded comet grain, still in the clean room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, will be distributed to researchers for study. The trail is about 1 millimeter long, while the dust grain is only 10 microns across. Photo Credit: Hope Ishii, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Here is how things stand right now: The Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) is in a storage cabinet in the Stardust Clean Room at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The automated scanning microscope has been installed in a laminar-flow tunnel in the Cosmic Dust Lab, which is just around the corner from the Stardust Lab. The microscope has been modified to accept the SIDC, and is ready to go.

If this were any ordinary object that we're scanning, we would have started weeks ago. But when you're working with something that is absolutely unique and priceless, and is half of the sample returned by a $200 million dollar mission, you have to be incredibly careful. You try to think of anything that can go wrong, even if it's very unlikely. It turns out that the microscope is in the line of fire of two fire sprinklers in the Cosmic Dust Lab. If they were to go off, the collector would be ruined in less than a minute. We can't put up a solid shield because it would interrupt the laminar air flow, and the clean tunnel that the microscope is in would no longer be clean. After some puzzling about how to deal with this, we decided to build a huge wall made of a metal honeycomb called hexcel. This will allow the clean air to flow in the tunnel, but will prevent water from getting on the SIDC if the sprinklers go off. 

We hope to finish the installation of this wall during the week of March 13-17. We will then transfer the SIDC from the Stardust Lab to the Cosmic Dust Lab (a big deal all by itself!), and start scanning. Our hope is that we will be able to start making data available to you soon after April 1.

Thank you very sincerely for your patience, and thank you in advance for your work on this project.

Andrew Westphal
Stardust@home Project Director