You Have to *Look* for Dust?

Distributed computing is all about the sum of some parts being greater than the whole, or something like that. An easy illustration of this is the University of California at Berkeley's SETI@home project which uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Stardust@home is a similiar distributed computing project.

Stardust@home is a space science project in which volunteers from the general public help scientists locate particles from distant stars. The particles were captured by the spacecraft Stardust and are embedded in collector plates made of aerogel, which were carried by the spacecraft. The aerogel plates, and the particles within them, were returned to Earth in a sample return capsule on January 15, 2006. The purpose of Stardust@home is to find the particles within the aerogel plates.

Stardust@home is looking for interstellar dust grains -- particles from distant stars that are now free-floating in space. They are extremely small, the largest being only a few microns in diameter, and are therefore very difficult to detect. In the past decade, spacecraft traveling beyond the orbit of Mars discovered that a steady stream of such particles is continually moving through our solar system as the solar system itself travels through the Milky Way galaxy. Using a Web-based virtual microscope, volunteers are looking for the fewer than 50 grains of submicroscopic interstellar dust expected to be there.

On August 1, the first day the project was open for business, Stardust@home drew nearly 115,000 volunteers searching for these interstellar motes within the millions of scans of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector that eventually will be put on the Internet. Traffic was so heavy, in fact, that the system was brought to a crawl. According to a note on the web site, project engineers were scrambling to add more servers.

The digital microscope scanner was developed by Stardust@home director Andrew Westphal, a UC Berkeley senior fellow and associate director of the campus's Space Sciences Laboratory, based on his previous experience scanning glass detectors for cosmic ray particles.

Interestingly, the Stardust@home project uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store and deliver the tens of million of images that represent the data collected from the dust particle aerogel experiment.

As for dust, if Stardust@home needs a little extra, come on over to my office--there's plenty to spare. But bring your own Endust.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:58 AM  Permalink