"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right."
- Jim Westphal

The best attitude for this project is this: Have Fun! If you're not having fun, stop.

As with any research project, the outcome is uncertain. You may be lucky enough to find an interstellar dust particle. You may find an interplanetary dust particle. You may find something entirely unexpected. Or you may search for hours or days and find nothing at all. The Stardust@home collaboration may search the entire collector and find nothing! Or, we may find thousands of interstellar dust particles, rather than the expected 45. We simply don't know what will happen. This unpredictability is what makes science fun!

The search will take several months to complete. Our automated microscope at the Johnson Space Center can scan about one tile of aerogel from the Stardust interstellar dust collector tray per day. There are 130 tiles in total. We may have false starts (in fact, we already have), where we discover a problem and have to rescan one or more tiles. For example, once we find a dust track, we may decide to change the lighting conditions or the scanning parameters so that the scans are better. Please be patient with us!

Don't be discouraged if you don't find something right away, or even later in the project if many interstellar dust grains have already been found. We don't know a lot about interstellar dust grains. But one thing that we do know is that they are diverse. Even if 99 interstellar dust grains are eventually identified near the end of the project, it may be that the 100th is the most important--the rare grain that turns out to be the key to understanding interstellar dust! Again, please be patient, and remember that the most important thing is to have fun.

This is a completely new approach to doing research. We are in utterly new territory—no one has ever done a project like this before, so we have no experience with it. As with any research project, we will be learning as we go. We will make mistakes (we guarantee it). We ask in advance for your patience. All we can promise is that we will do our best.

We will rely on your feedback to improve things as we go.
If you have ideas, suggestions, or questions, please use our message board to communicate those to us. We cannot guarantee that we will agree with every recommendation that you make. If we do, and it is practical to adopt it, we will do so. We will acknowledge those who make specific, constructive and polite recommendations on our website, even if we don't adopt them. We may not be able to respond personally to every message.