[meteorite-list] Stardust_at_home Launches August 1

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Aug 1 11:09:38 2006
Message-ID: <200608011507.IAA26493_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/07/31_stardust.shtml

Stardust_at_home launches Aug. 1
Robert Sanders
UC Berkeley Press Release
31 July 2006

BERKELEY - On your marks, dust hunters! The University of California,
Berkeley's Stardust_at_home project - a needle-in-a-haystack search for
interstellar dust that's open to anyone with a computer - gets off the
ground tomorrow (Tuesday, August 1) at 11 a.m. PDT.

The project was announced in January as NASA's Stardust spacecraft was
prepared to deliver to Earth its payload of cometary and interstellar
dust grains embedded in a relative ocean of aerogel detector. Almost
immediately, Stardust_at_home drew nearly 115,000 volunteers eager to
search for these interstellar motes within the millions of scans of the
Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector that eventually will be put on the
Internet.

Using a Web-based virtual microscope developed at UC Berkeley,
volunteers will vie to find the fewer than 50 grains of submicroscopic
interstellar dust expected to be there.

Stardust_at_home director Andrew Westphal, a UC Berkeley senior fellow and
associate director of the campus's Space Sciences Laboratory, said he
hopes the dust particles, made in supernova explosions as much as 10
million years ago, will provide clues to the internal processes of
distant stars. Supernovas, flaring red giants and neutron stars all
produce interstellar dust and generate the heavy elements like carbon,
nitrogen and oxygen, that are necessary for life.

"How we analyze these grains depends a lot on how big they are,"
Westphal said, noting that if they are as large as the comet dust they
could be studied with an X-ray microscope or probed with ion or electron
beams. "These grains will be so precious that they will be studied for
decades."

A panel of 132 tiles of aerogel, a foamy material that is the lightest
known manmade solid, brought speeding dust to a soft landing as Stardust
cruised through space toward its rendezvous with comet Wild 2 in 2004.
While many of the more abundant grains of comet dust have already been
extracted from a separate panel of aerogel detectors and are now being
analyzed, the search for micron-sized grains of interstellar dust has
been held up by the difficulty of scanning the aerogel.

"The scanning, which is being done at Johnson Space Center in Houston,
has been more challenging than we hoped," said Westphal. "The terrain of
the aerogel surface is rougher than we expected, which makes it
difficult to get the scanner in focus."

Westphal developed the digital microscope scanner based on his previous
experience scanning glass detectors for cosmic ray particles. The
scanner is now on loan from UC Berkeley to NASA's Johnson Space Center,
where colleagues Jack Warren and Ron Bastien are scanning the
interstellar dust collector in the Cosmic Dust Laboratory. In each field
of view, which is about the size of a grain of salt, the scanner focuses
at 42 depths into the transparent aerogel, from the surface down to 100
microns - the thickness of a human hair. These are turned into a "focus
movie" that volunteers using the virtual microscope can easily view with
the glide of a mouse.

Despite the scanning difficulties, he and team members Dr. Anna
Butterworth, physics graduate student Joshua Von Korff, Dr. Bryan Mendez
of the Center for Science Education at the Space Sciences Laboratory,
undergraduate Xu Zhang, and programmer Robert Lettieri are ready to go
with about 40,000 fields of view for volunteers to search.

"The volunteers may go through that in a day," Westphal acknowledged.
But it's critical, he added, to have many eyes look at each field of
view and focus up and down through the aerogel to find the rare,
carrot-shaped tracks made by dust grains slamming into the detector. As
volunteers search through the available scans, more will be added as
NASA personnel scan up to four new tiles a week. The last should be
available in early 2007 and bring the total fields of view to 700,000,
entailing nearly 30 million separate scans.

"Several hundred volunteers have expressed their anxious anticipation of
the launch of the project," noted Mendez. "All the pre-registrants will
receive by August 1 an e-mail announcing the launch of the project and
inviting them to come to the Web site, read the background information
and practice searching in the tutorial. When they have completed that,
they may take an online test to see how good they are at finding
simulated star dust tracks. If they successfully complete the test, they
can then register and begin using the virtual microscope to search for
real stardust tracks."

Those who find a confirmed dust grain will get the chance to name it.

Westphal came up with the Stardust_at_home idea as an inexpensive way to
search the detectors for the several dozen grains of dust, each too
small to see with the naked eye. He worked with computer scientist David
Anderson, director of UC Berkeley's SETI_at_home project, and graduate
student Von Korff to develop the virtual microscope. Mendez and Nahide
Craig, assistant research astronomers at the laboratory, are creating a
teacher's lesson guide that uses the Stardust_at_home virtual microscope to
teach students about star dust and the origins of the solar system.
Sections of the Stardust_at_home Web site
(http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) are also aimed at the general
public.

The project is funded by NASA and has received critical technical and
developmental support from Amazon Web Services and The Planetary
Society, which has also supported the SETI_at_home project to detect
intelligent signals from space. SETI_at_home is an automated program that
acts as a screen saver on home computers. Unlike SETI_at_home, where the
computer processes all the data, Stardust_at_home is a hands-on activity.
And it offers the public a rare chance to participate in a NASA mission.

"Think of this mission as the ultimate cosmic road trip," said Bruce
Betts, The Planetary Society's director of projects. "On long journeys,
you're bound to end up with a few bugs - or dust particles - smashed
against the windshield, but in the case of Stardust, the research team
wanted to collect them intact without smashing or vaporizing them."

The Stardust_at_home project uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon
S3) to store and deliver the tens of million of images that represent
the data collected from the dust particle aerogel experiment.
Received on Tue 01 Aug 2006 11:07:01 AM PDT