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Profile dbrinza
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Message 230531 - Posted: 13 Jan 2006, 9:14:26 UTC
Last modified: 13 Jan 2006, 9:14:55 UTC

The Stardust mission return cannister will streak across northern California and Nevada early Sunday morning (just after 2 am PST) before landing in the desert of Utah. The cannister includes aerogel material (almost like "frozen glass smoke") used to capture dust particles from comet Wild 2 which the spacecraft flew by over 2 years ago. See the Stardust homepage for more info about the mission and landing:

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/

BOINC will be hosting a program to allow trained volunteers to scan microscopic images of the aerogel material in search of tracks from cometary and even interstellar dust particles. For more info about the new BOINC Stardust@Home project see:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/01/10_dust.shtml

This could be an interesting experiment for the distributed computing community to be involved with...

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Message 230540 - Posted: 13 Jan 2006, 9:45:49 UTC

Quoting JM7 from the other stardust@home thread:

A word of warning. It is NOT a boinc project. If you sign up, you will be hand inspecting microsope images - some share of about 30,000 hours of them.

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Message 230604 - Posted: 13 Jan 2006, 14:58:10 UTC - in response to Message 230540.  
Last modified: 13 Jan 2006, 15:03:47 UTC

Quoting JM7 from the other stardust@home thread:

A word of warning. It is NOT a boinc project. If you sign up, you will be hand inspecting microsope images - some share of about 30,000 hours of them.

End Quote

Seems like there's some sort of a "virtual microscope" to be manually operated to adjust focus to examine tracks in images obtained from an automated microscope at NASA Johnson Space Center. It might be "fun" for an hour or so, but it is part of doing the science for the mission (albeit a rather tedious task.)

BTW, I couldn't find the other stardust@home thread (I tried searching from the "Message Board" page and found some news stories, but no discussion), could you provide the link??

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Message 230611 - Posted: 13 Jan 2006, 15:14:19 UTC - in response to Message 230604.  

BTW, I couldn't find the other stardust@home thread (I tried searching from the "Message Board" page and found some news stories, but no discussion), could you provide the link??


OK, I found a post by Jason Safoutin that includes this link to the ssl stardust@home page:

Stardust@Home



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Profile ML1
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Message 230618 - Posted: 13 Jan 2006, 15:28:57 UTC - in response to Message 230604.  
Last modified: 13 Jan 2006, 15:30:08 UTC

Seems like there's some sort of a "virtual microscope" to be manually operated to adjust focus to examine tracks in images obtained from an automated microscope at NASA Johnson Space Center. It might be "fun" for an hour or so, but

I'm surprised that there is no image processing software to search and preselect images 'of interest' for humans to then chase up later. Should speed things up and keep it more interesting for easily bored humans...

Regards,
Martin

ps: Any image processing hackers out there? Bang it onto a GPU even??
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Message 230831 - Posted: 14 Jan 2006, 0:21:40 UTC

What the hay, I signed up. For a time I scanned photo's of mars looking for signs of crators, then circled them for some project of other, I don't remember which. You do it for short periods at a time.

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Message 231206 - Posted: 14 Jan 2006, 21:04:04 UTC

Here is my expert artist interpretation of the space mission in question:


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Message 232119 - Posted: 16 Jan 2006, 12:53:04 UTC
Last modified: 16 Jan 2006, 12:55:40 UTC

While artistic license can capture the imagination (nice rendering by MattDavis), sometimes reality is pretty stunning too. The image below shows the Stardust capsule blazing across the sky along with the landed hardware in the mud at the Utah Test and Training Range.



For more information checkout the Stardust Homepage

I watched the entry, descent and landing coverage live Sunday early morning on "NASA TV". For a little while, the some of the operations team didn't know whether the drogue parachute had worked. Fortunately, all went well and in a couple of months, some of us will be helping look for captured interstellar dust particles.

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Profile D.J. Schweitz
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Message 232254 - Posted: 16 Jan 2006, 19:12:19 UTC

I signed up as well, now its just a question as to wither I pass the qualification test.
Click below for our Team Website
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