Stardust's interstellar dust collector at the Stardust@home Lab
Credit: NASA/JSC
SYDNEY, 15 August 2006: With NASA's Stardust mission safely returned to Earth, the University of California at Berkley is recruiting eager volunteers worldwide to hunt for a needle in an interstellar haystack.
The Stardust mission returned to Earth with a thud in January 2006 bearing a gel which had embedded a few sparse grains of interstellar dust, collected as the spacecraft journeyed to and from a rendezvous the comet Wild 2.
Don Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator at the University of Washington, Seattle, said that the dust will allow researchers to "work with the actual building materials of the solar system as they were when the solar system was formed."
However sifting through millions of scans of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector would take scientists years, so the team is asking anyone with a computer to get involved.
Director of the ‘Stardust@home' project, Andrew Westphal, a UC Berkeley senior fellow and associate director of the campus' 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 analyse these grains depends a lot on how big they are," Westphal said. "These grains will be so precious that they will be studied for decades."
Westphal came up with the Stardust@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@home project, and graduate student Von Korff to develop a virtual microscope.
The general public are asked to undergo a tutorial before examining microscope slides for evidence of stardust. http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Lucky stardust discoverers will have the privilege of having the dust particle named after them.
Westphal said it was critical to have many eyes look at each slide and focus up and down through the gel to find the rare, carrot-shaped tracks made by dust grains slamming into it. As volunteers search through the available scans, more will be added as NASA personnel scan more. The last should be available in early 2007 and bring the total number of slides to 700,000, entailing nearly 30 million separate scans.
with UC Berkley
