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Stardust@Home
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dbrinza Send message Joined: 31 May 99 Posts: 60 Credit: 16,887,043 RAC: 269 |
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... |
Terry Send message Joined: 17 Sep 00 Posts: 153 Credit: 1,805,202 RAC: 0 |
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 |
dbrinza Send message Joined: 31 May 99 Posts: 60 Credit: 16,887,043 RAC: 269 |
Quoting JM7 from the other stardust@home thread: 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?? |
dbrinza Send message Joined: 31 May 99 Posts: 60 Credit: 16,887,043 RAC: 269 |
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 |
ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20258 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20 |
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?? See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) |
The Pirate Send message Joined: 14 Apr 00 Posts: 191 Credit: 4,929,008 RAC: 0 |
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MattDavis Send message Joined: 11 Nov 99 Posts: 919 Credit: 934,161 RAC: 0 |
Here is my expert artist interpretation of the space mission in question: ----- |
dbrinza Send message Joined: 31 May 99 Posts: 60 Credit: 16,887,043 RAC: 269 |
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. |
D.J. Schweitz Send message Joined: 29 Oct 02 Posts: 157 Credit: 871,078 RAC: 0 |
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