From the people who brought you SETI@Home comes Stardust@home, the search for interstellar dust, that was launched by UC Berkeley on Tuesday.
Some 115,000 volunteers are anxiously searching for dust grains from NASA’s Stardust spacecraft, which delivered its payload of cometary and interstellar dust grains embedded in a relative ocean of aerogel detector, according to a UC Berkeley article about the project.
The volunteers will 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,” the article explains.
And the prize for finding a dust grain? The lucky volunteer will get the chance to name it.
Read the full UC Berkeley article here.
Linda Leung, lleung@nww.com
