[meteorite-list] PC Users Come To Aid Of Scientists (Stardust_at_home)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Aug 10 11:31:13 2006
Message-ID: <200608101528.IAA14091_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.dust10aug10,0,1440846.story

PC users come to aid of scientists

Amateurs combine their power to help pros on big projects
By Michael Stroh
Baltimore Sun
August 10, 2006

By day, Martin Courtney pounds out reports for a government contractor.
But at night, in his South Baltimore rowhouse, his job title is far more
exotic: cosmic dust hunter.

Courtney is one of thousands of recruits squinting at their computer
screens each day in an unusual scientific treasure hunt: the quest to
find microscopic motes of interstellar dust captured by NASA's Stardust
spacecraft.

The project is a new twist on a growing scientific trend. As research
budgets shrink and the hunger for number-crunching grows, more
professional scientists are seeking help from interested amateurs and
their Internet-connected computers.

The Stardust probe returned to Earth in January after seven years
trolling the solar system for comet and interstellar dust. Scientists
have extracted most of the comet debris from the probe. But an estimated
50 microscopic motes of interstellar dust remain hidden in its tennis
racket-size particle collector.

"It's like trying to find 50 ants on a football field," says physicist
Andrew Westphal. It would take years for the small NASA Stardust team to
root them out, he says.

So Westphal and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley
have begun a project called Stardust_at_home to help NASA. Open to anybody
with a computer and keen eyes, the project offers armchair scientists
the chance to scour Stardust's particle collector with an online virtual
microscope.

"It's so tremendous," says Courtney, 30. "You're looking at something
not a lot of people have seen."

The strategy behind Stardust_at_home is known as distributed computing or
grid computing. It was popularized in the late 1990s by scientists
involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

In that continuing effort, volunteers download free software that sifts
radio telescope signals for signs of extraterrestrial chatter. The
software grinds away unobtrusively in the background or kicks in when
the computer is idle, then ships results back to the project's central
computer.

SETI_at_home, as the project is known, has yet to find evidence of
extraterrestrial life. But it has demonstrated that puny personal
computers can collectively outperform supercomputers at a tiny fraction
of the cost. More important, it shows that millions are willing to
donate their PCs' idle time to science.

In the wake of SETI's success, more than two dozen distributed computing
projects have come online. Today, for example, volunteers can help
scientists forecast global climate change, hunt for elusive
gravitational waves and discover new drugs to fight AIDS and other diseases.

"I wouldn't go so far as to say distributed computing has completely
changed the scientific landscape. But it's on the verge of doing that,"
says David Anderson, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley and director of
SETI_at_home.

"The groups that have more computer power, they're just able to do
research other people can't. And that translates into publications."

Few know that better than Vijay Pande, professor of chemistry at
Stanford University. Six years ago, Pande started a distributed
computing project to study the behavior of proteins involved in diseases
such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.

About 200,000 volunteer computer users around the world crunch Pande's
protein data. Leasing the equivalent amount of computing horsepower, he
notes, would cost $1.75 billion a year at commercial rates. The flood of
data generated by the volunteer computer users has resulted in 40
scientific papers.

"It allows us to do things that wouldn't be possible otherwise," he says.

Some experts caution that as distributed computing projects grow more
common, thorny questions might arise about credit and intellectual property.

"One fundamental question with all these projects is who owns the
results," says Berkeley's Anderson. "In some cases, you're crunching
things that could produce drugs. That's the real bottom line."

For volunteers such as Greg Lawrence, a 66-year-old retired entrepreneur
in Biloxi, Miss., that is the point. Like many volunteers, Lawrence got
hooked on distributed computing through SETI.

Then he learned that his 4-year-old granddaughter, Maegan, had cancer.
"That really spurred me," he says.

Lawrence has nine computers running around the clock on Rosetta_at_home, a
University of Washington-based project that analyzes proteins tied to
cancer and other diseases. He has persuaded many friends and family
members to sign on.

"I don't expect what I'm doing will directly help my granddaughter," he
says. "But I hope it will help others. So we're doing some good."

Though the interstellar dust captured by NASA's Stardust has no direct
commercial value, scientists are eager to get their hands on it.

Generated in the fiery explosions of faraway stars, the particles could
shed new light on their composition and internal machinery, says
astronomer Donald Brownlee, principal investigator of the Stardust mission.

"How valuable are they? Well, I don't know. How valuable is a newborn
baby?" he says.

The dust was captured on a honeycombed collector filled with a
transparent, foamlike substance called aerogel to cushion the impact of
landing. Composed of 99.8 percent air, aerogel holds a Guinness record
as the lightest manmade solid, so light that some scientists dub it
"solid smoke."

Picking out the particles amid the scratches and other defects in the
aerogel hasn't been easy, especially because each mote measures less
than 1/25,000 of an inch. It would take about a hundred of the specks to
span a human hair.

Westphal and his team originally considered writing pattern-recognition
software to scan the aerogel for signs of the cosmic shards. But for an
automated search to work, scientists would first have to tell the
computer what to look for.

That posed a problem. The interstellar dust plowed into the aerogel at
12 miles a second, an impact that can't be simulated in any Earth-based
lab. "We don't always know what the tracks are going to look like,"
Westphal says.

In the end, Westphal opted for the human eye.

So the Stardust team has spent months photographing the aerogel with a
digital microscope. Each image covers an area about the size of a grain
of salt. It will take 30 million scans to cover the entire collector,
which is stored in a clean room at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Once they register and view a short tutorial, volunteers can download
images of the aerogel and begin searching for dust trails, which
scientists say should look distinct from scratches and other defects.

Those finding confirmed particles will appear as co-authors on the
team's scientific paper and will have the opportunity to name their motes.

Experts say Stardust_at_home could signal a new breed of distributed
computing project in which people - and not their machines - do most of
the work.

"We are in utterly new territory," the Berkeley team says on its Web
site, stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu.

For many, that seems to be the big draw. When the Stardust_at_home site
went live this month, the crush of eager dust hunters caused the
project's computers to crash.

"We've just been slammed," Westphal says.

Daniel Thurston, an aircraft electrician in Abilene, Texas, has spent
countless hours glued to his computer, hunting down motes.

"The wife is going, 'What the hell are you doing?'" he says. But he
doubts that he'll stop. "It's just so addicting," he says.
Received on Thu 10 Aug 2006 11:28:32 AM PDT