[meteorite-list] Keeping Your Eyes Peeled for Cosmic Debris (Stardust)

From: Martin Horejsi <accretiondesk_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue May 30 15:23:42 2006
Message-ID: <9c2f96d20605292125g18ab1480ufdf7fef17a547870_at_mail.gmail.com>

Hi Ron and All,

After talking with Andrew in Houston back in January, I knew I would
be addicted to Stardust_at_home if for no other reason than the fun of
the challenge (same reason I played the Google Da Vinci Code game and
won a cryptex). So in jest to my friends who also are hooked on the
search for particle tracks, I started a Stardust_at_home support group.
Here is the URL. Hope it makes you smile.

http://www.geocities.com/planetwhy/stardustaddicts.html

Maybe I already posted this??

Cheers,

Martin



On 5/29/06, Ron Baalke <baalke_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
> http://www.bloggernews.net/2006/05/keeping-your-eyes-peeled-for-cosmic.html
>
> Keeping your eyes peeled for cosmic debris
> Blogger News Network
> May 28, 2006
>
> Stardust is a NASA space capsule that collected samples from comet Wild
> 2 in deep space and landed back on Earth on January 15, 2006. It was
> decided that distributed computing would be used to "discover" the samples
> the capsule collected. The project is called Stardust_at_home.
>
> Andrew Westphal is the director of Stardust_at_home and Wikinews
> interviewed him for May's Interview of the Month (IOTM) on May 18, 2006.
>
> Wikinews: Some may not know exactly what Stardust and or Stardust_at_home
> are. Can you explain more about it for us?
>
> Andrew Westphal: Stardust is a NASA Discovery mission that was launch in
> 1999. It is really two missions in one. The primary science goal of the
> mission was to collect a sample from a known primitive solar-system
> body, a comet called Wild2 (pronounced "Vilt-two" -- the discoverer was
> German, I believe). This is the first US "sample return" mission since
> Apollo, and the first ever from beyond the moon. This gives a little
> context. By "sample return" of course I mean a mission that brings back
> extraterrestrial material. I should have said above that this is the
> first "solid" sample return mission -- Genesis brought back a sample
> from the Sun almost two years ago, but Stardust is also bringing back
> the first solid samples from the local interstellar medium -- basically
> this is a sample of the Galaxy. This is absolutely unprecedented, and
> we're obviously incredibly excited. I should mention parenthetically
> that there is a fantastic launch video -- taken from the POV of the
> rocket on the JPL Stardust website -- highly recommended -- best I've
> ever seen -- all the way from the launch pad to. Basically
> interplanetary trajectory. Absolutely great.
>
> WN: Is the video available to the public?
>
> Andrew Westphal: Yes. OK, I digress. The first challenge that we have
> before can do any kind of analysis of these interstellar dust particles
> is simply to find them. This is a big challenge because they are very
> small (order of micron in size) and are somewhere (we don't know where)
> on a HUGE collector-- at least on the scale of the particle size --
> about a tenth of a square meter. SO...
>
> We're right now using an automated microscope that we developed several
> years ago for nuclear astrophysics work to scan the collector in the
> Cosmic Dust Lab in Building 31 at Johnson Space Center. This is the ARES
> group that handles returned samples (Moon Rocks, Genesis chips,
> Meteorites, and Interplanetary Dust Particles collected by U2 in the
> stratosphere). The microscope collects stacks of digital images of the
> aerogel collectors in the array. These images are sent to us -- we
> compress them and convert them into a format appropriate for Stardust_at_home.
>
> Stardust_at_home is a highly distributed project using a "Virtual
> Microscope" that is written in html and javascript and runs on most
> browsers -- no downloads are required. Using the Virtual Microscope
> volunteers can search over the collector for the tracks of the
> interstellar dust particles.
>
> WN: How many samples do you anticipate to be found during the course of
> the project?
>
> A.W.: Great question. The short answer is that we don't know. The long
> answer is a bit more complicated. Here's what we know. The Galileo and
> Ulysses spacecraft carried dust detectors onboard that Eberhard Gruen
> and his colleagues used to first detect and them measure the flux of
> interstellar dust particles streaming into the solar system. (This is a
> kind of "wind" of interstellar dust, caused by the fact that our solar
> system is moving with respect to the local interstellar medium.) Markus
> Landgraf has estimated the number of interstellar dust particles that
> should have been captured by Stardust during two periods of the "cruise"
> phase of the interplanetary orbit in which the spacecraft was moving
> with this wind. He estimated that there should be around 45 particles,
> but this number is very uncertain -- I wouldn't be surprised if it is
> quite different from that. That was the long answer! One thing that I
> should say...is that like all research, the outcome of what we are doing
> is highly uncertain. There is a wonderful quote attributed to Einstein
> -- "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called "research",
> would it?"
>
> WN: How big would the samples be?
>
> A.W.: We expect that the particles will be of order a micron in size. (A
> millionth of a meter.) When people are searching using the virtual
> microscope, they will be looking not for the particles, but for the
> tracks that the particles make, which are much larger -- several microns
> in diameter. Just yesterday we switched over to a new site which has a
> demo of the VM (virtual microscope) I invite you to check it out. The
> tracks in the demo are from submicron carbonyl iron particles that were
> shot into aerogel using a particle accelerator modified to accelerate
> dust particles to very high speeds, to simulate the interstellar dust
> impacts that we're looking for.
>
> WN: And that's on the main Stardust_at_home website?
>
> A.W.: Yes.
>
> WN: How long will the project take to complete?
>
> A.W.: Partly the answer depends on what you mean by "the project". The
> search will take several months. The bottleneck, we expect (but don't
> really know yet) is in the scanning -- we can only scan about one tile
> per day and there are 130 tiles in the collector. is that these
> particles will be quite diverse, so we're hoping that we'll continue to
> have lots of volunteers collaborating with us on this after the initial
> discoveries. It may be that the 50th particle that we find will be the
> real Rosetta stone that turns out to be critical to our understanding of
> interstellar dust. So we really want to find them all! Enlarging the
> idea of the project a little, beyond the search, though is to actually
> analyze these particles. That's the whole point, obviously!
>
> A.W.: And this is the huge advantage with this kind of a mission -- a
> "sample return" mission.
>
> A.W.: Most missions rather do things quite differently... you have to
> build an instrument to make a measurement and that instrument design
> gets locked in several years before launch practically guaranteeing that
> it will be obsolete by the time you launch. Here exactly the opposite is
> true. Several of the instruments that are now being used to analyze the
> cometary dust did not exist when the mission was launched. Further, some
> instruments (e.g., synchrotrons) are the size of shopping malls -- you
>
> A.W.: don't have a hope of flying these in space. So we can and will
> study these samples for many years. AND we have to preserve some of
> these dust particles for our grandchildren to analyze with their
> hyper-quark-gluon plasma microscopes! (or whatever)
>
> When do you anticipate the project to start?
>
> A.W.: We're really frustrated with the delays that we've been having.
> Some of it has to do with learning how to deal with the aerogel
> collectors, which are rougher and more fractured than we expected. The
> good news is that they are pretty clean -- there is very little of the
> dust that you see on our training images -- these were deliberately left
> out in the lab to collect dust so that we could give people experience
> with the worst case we could think of. In learning how to do the
> scanning of the actual flight aerogel, we uncovered a couple of bugs in
> our scanning software -- which forced us to go back and rescan. Part of
> the other reason for the delay was that we had to learn how to handle
> the collector -- it would cost $200M to replace it if something happened
> to it, so we had to develop procedures to deal with it, and add several
> new safety features to the Cosmic Dust Lab. This all took time. Finally,
> we're distracted because we also have many responsibilities for the
> cometary analysis, which has a deadline of August 15 for finishing
> analysis. The IS project has no such deadline, so at times we had to
> delay the IS (interstellar, sorry) in order to focus on the cometary
> work. We are very grateful to everyone for their patience on this -- I
> mean that very sincerely.
>
> A.W.: And rest assured that we're just as frustrated!
>
> I know there will be a "test" that participants will have to take before
> they can examine the "real thing". What will that test consist of?
>
> A.W.: The test will look very similar to the training images that you
> can look at now. But.. there will of course be no annotation to tell you
> where the tracks are!
>
> Why did NASA decide to take the route of distributed computing? Will
> they do this again?
>
> A.W.: I wouldn't say that NASA decided to do this -- the idea for
> Stardust_at_home originated here at U. C. Berkeley. Part of the idea of
> course came
>
> If I understand correctly it isn't distributed computing, but
> distributed eyeballing?
>
> A.W.: from the SETI_at_home people who are just down the hall from us. But
> as brianmc just pointed out. this is not really distributed computing
> like SETI_at_home the computers are just platforms for the VM and it is
> human eyes and brains who are doing the real work which makes it fun (IMHO)
>
> A.W.: THAT SAID... There have been quite a few people who have expressed
> interested in developing automated algorithms for searching. Just
> because WE don't know how to write such an algorithm doesn't mean NOBODY
> does. We're delighted at this and are happy to help make it happen
>
> Isn't there a catch 22 that the data you're going to collect would be a
> prerequisite to automating the process?
>
> A.W.: That was the conclusion that we can to early on -- that we would
> need some sort of training set to be able to train an algorithm. Of
> course you have to train people too, but we're hoping (we'll see..!)
> that people are more flexible in recognizing things that they've never
> seen before and pointing them out. Our experience is that people who
> have never seen a track in aerogel can learn to recognize them very
> quickly, even against a big background of cracks, dust and other sources
> of confusion... Coming back to the original question -- although NASA
> didn't originate the idea, they are very generously supporting this
> project. It wouldn't have happened without NASA's financial support (and
> of course access to the Stardust collector) Did that answer the question?
>
> Will a project like this be done again?
>
> A.W.: I don't know... There are only a few projects for which this
> approach makes sense... In fact, I frankly haven't run across another at
> least in Space Science. But I am totally open to the idea of it. I am
> not in favor of just doing it as "make-work" -- that is just
> artificially taking this approach when another approach would make more
> sense.
>
> How did the idea come up to do this kind of project?
>
> A.W.: Really desperation. When we first thought about this we assumed
> that we would use some sort of automated image recognition technique. We
> asked some experts around here in CS and the conclusion was that the
> problem was somewhere between trivial and impossible, and we wouldn't
> know until we had some real examples to work with. So we talked with Dan
> Wertheimer and Dave Anderson (literally down the hall from us) about the
> idea of a distributed project, and they were quite encouraging. Dave
> proposed the VM machinery, and Josh Von Korff, a physics grad student,
> implemented it. (Beautifully, I think. I take no credit!)
>
> I got to meet one of the stardust directors in March during the Texas
> Aerospace Scholars program at JSC. She talked about searching for
> meteors in Antarctica, one that were unblemished by Earth conditions. Is
> that our best chance of finding new information on comets and asteroids?
> Or will more Stardust programs be our best solution?
>
> A.W.: That's a really good question. Much will depend on what we learn
> during this official "Preliminary Examination" period for the cometary
> analysis. Aerogel capture is pretty darn good, but it's not perfect and
> things are altered during capture in ways that we're still
> understanding. I think that much also depends on what question you're
> asking. For example, some of the most important science is done by
> measuring the relative abundances of isotopes in samples, and these are
> not affected (at least not much) by capture into aerogel.
>
> Also, she talked about how some of the agencies whom they gave samples
> to had lost or destroyed 2-3 samples while trying to analyze them. That
> one, in fact, had been statically charged, and stuck to the side of the
> microscope lens and they spent over an hour looking for it. Is that
> really our biggest danger? Giving out samples as a show of good faith,
> and not letting NASA example all samples collected?
>
> A.W.: These will be the first measurements, probably, that we'll make on
> the interstellar dust There is always a risk of loss. Fortunately for
> the cometary samples there is quite a lot there, so it's not a disaster.
> NASA has some analytical capabilities, particularly at JSC, but the vast
> majority of the analytical capability in the community is not at NASA
> but is at universities, government labs and other institutions all over
> the world. I should also point out that practically every analytical
> technique is destructive at some level. (There are a few exceptions, but
> not many.) The problem with meteorites is that except in a very few
> cases, we don't know where they specifically came from. So having a
> sample that we KNOW for sure is from the comet is golden!_at_
>
> I am currently working on my Bachelor's in computer science, with a
> minor in astronomy. Do you see successes of programs like Stardust to
> open up more private space exploration positions for people such as
> myself. Even though I'm not in the typical "space" fields of education?
>
> A.W.: Can you elaborate on your question a little -- I'm not sure that I
> understand...
>
> Well, while at JSC I learned that they mostly want Engineers, and a few
> science grads, and I worry that my computer science degree with not be
> very valuable, as the NASA rep told me only 1% of the applicants for
> their work study program are CS majors. Im just curious as to your
> thoughts on if CS majors will be more in demand now that projects like
> Stardust and the Mars missions have been great successes? Have you seen
> a trend towards more private businesses moving in that direction,
> especially with President Bush's statement of Man on the Moon in 2015?
>
> A.W.: That's a good question. I am personally not very optimistic about
> the direction that NASA is going. Despite recent successes, including
> but not limited to Stardust, science at NASA is being decimated
>
> I made a joke with some people at the TAS event that one day
> SpaceShipOne will be sent up to save stranded ISS astronauts. It makes
> me wonder what kind of private redundancy the US government is taking
> for future missions
>
> A.W.: I guess one thing to be a little cautious about is that despite
> SpaceShipOne's success,we haven't had an _orbital_ project that has been
> successful in that style of private enterprise It would be nice to see
> that happen. I know that there's a lot of interest...!
>
> Now I know the answer to this question...but a lot do not...When samples
> are found, How will they be analyzed? Who gets the credit for finding
> the samples?
>
> A.W.: The first person who identifies an interstellar dust particle will
> be acknowledged on the website (and probably will be much in demand for
> interviews from the media!), will have the privilege of naming the particle,
>
> A.W.: and will be a co-author on any papers that WE (at UCB) publish on
> the analysis of the particle. Also, although we are precluded from
> paying for travel expenses, we will invite those who discover particles
> AND the top performers to our lab for a hands-on tour.
>
> A.W.: We have some fun things, including micromachines.
>
> How many people/participants do you expect to have?
>
> A.W.: About 113,000 have preregistered on our website. Frankly, I don't
> have a clue how many will actually volunteer and do a substantial amount
> of searching. We've never done this before, after all!
>
> One last thing I want to say ... well, two. First, we are going to
> special efforts NOT to do any searching ourselves before we go "live".
> It would not be fair to all the volunteers for us to get a jumpstart on
> the search. ALL we are doing is looking at a few random views to make
> sure that the focus and illumination are good. (And we haven't seen
> anything -- no surprise at all!) Also, the attitude for this should be:
> Have Fun. If you're not having fun doing it, stop and do something else!
> A good maxim for life in general!
>
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Received on Tue 30 May 2006 12:25:51 AM PDT