"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
- attributed to Albert Einstein

How to participate:

First, you will go through a web-based training session. You must pass a test to qualify to register and participate. After passing the test and registering, you will be able to login to the virtual microscope. The VM will automatically connect to our server and download focus movies. The VM will work within your web browser, under your control. You will search each field for interstellar dust impacts by focusing up and down with a focus control.

The VM downloads and displays these images, so that you can do just what someone sitting at real microscope would do: focusing up and down in each movie to look for tracks. To use the VM you will need a relatively fast internet connection, and the latest version of just about any web browser. To find out more about the system requirements for the VM visit our Technical FAQ.

Some things to keep in mind while searching...

The instructions for searching with the VM are simple. Click on the tracks if you find them, or click on "No Track." If any part of the FOV does not focus beneath the surface of the aerogel then click on "Bad Focus." If you see something else of possible interest that does not appear to be a flaw in the aerogel or a particle track, you should click on that as well.

Each focus movie will be viewed by many different people. When a volunteer identifies the focus movie as either having or not having a particle track the movie will be given a score. The score the focus movie receives will be weighted by the score of the volunteer.

Volunteers will receive a score based on how well they identify calibration focus movies. While you are searching, you will be shown calibration FOVs at random. These are FOVs known to contain either real tracks or no tracks. About one out of every five of the FOVs that you view will be calibration FOVs. You will not know beforehand which are calibration FOVs and which are FOVs from the Stardust interstellar dust collector. We do this to measure how efficient you are at searching. It also allows YOU to see how efficient you are. On the VM, you will see two measures of efficiency: sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity is a measure of how good you are at correctly identifying tracks. Specificity is a measure of how good you are at correctly identifying blank FOVs. You will have an overall score that is a measure of your accomplishment. The score is simply the number of correctly-identified calibration FOVs minus the number of incorrectly-identified calibration FOVs. You can't get a high score just by clicking on images as fast as you can (you might even get a negative score that way!!).

Keep an open mind about what tracks may look like. For the training and test, we used tracks of extraterrestrial particles that were captured in a collector on the Russian space station Mir, and tracks of submicron dust particles shot into aerogel at 20 km/sec using a Van Der Graaf dust accelerator. It may turn out that the tracks of real interstellar dust will look quite different. They may be deeper or shallower, wider or narrower. We will see once we have found the first few examples of real interstellar dust.