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Projects: Stardust@homeStardust@home Update : Steady Progress towards LaunchMay 18, 2006: 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. Planetary Society Members Load Test: In late April, Planetary Society members took part in a load test of the Stardust@home system. The point of the exercise was to stress the system as much as possible – have as many people log on simultaneously and see if Stardust@home can handle the traffic. To accomplish this Planetary Society members were asked to log on to specific website, where they registered and scanned as many movies as they could, using the Virtual Microscope. The movies scanned in the load test were not true stardust movies, from the spacecraft's aerogel collector. These are not yet available. Instead, the load testers scanned movies of aerogel that had been used to absorb particles at an accelerator in Germany. This did not matter for the load test, since the size of these movies is identical to that of the "real thing," and the load on the system was the same. The test was entirely successful. Hundreds of people from around the world logged on at the allotted time, and scanned the aerogel movies using the Virtual Microscope. The Stardust@home system took the load effortlessly, without any apparent slowing in the uploading of the aerogel movies. "The load test went great" said Westphal; "in addition to the testing our system, we also got a lot of excellent feedback that we're now working on implementing."
Aerogel scanning continues at the Johnson Space Center: On April 21 Anna Butterworth started the scanning of the aerogel at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Unfortunately, after a fast start the scanning slowed to a crawl and the Stardust@home crew had to stop and figure out what was going on. After several days of hard work they found that the problem was at the interface between the hardware and the software controlling the movement of the scanning telescope. As of May 17 it seems that the issue has been resolved, and the scanning is moving along. It will be a few days, however, before the Stardust@home team is fully confident that they have seen the last of this problem. The end result of all this is that the launch of Stardust@home has been delayed. Westphal and his crew had hoped to begin sending out movies to users on May 17, but the scanning delays made this impossible. While this is unfortunate, delays like this are to be expected in a groundbreaking project like this. We are in utterly new territory ---no one has ever done a project like this before, so we have no experience with it , says Andrew Westphal. He adds a favorite Einstein quote: "If we knew what we were doing, this wouldn't be called `research', would it?"
New Stardust@home website launched: The Stardust@home website, http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu, has been completely revamped and now contains new materials and information. Among other features, it now allows those who want to check out the project to go through the Stardust@home training process. Testing and registration will wait until the project is launched in the coming weeks. - Amir Alexander |
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