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September 12, 2007
Update from The Planetary Society A story from the Planetary Society about Stardust@home Phase 2. August 10, 2007
Stardust Phase 2 Begins Today marks the beginning of a new and exciting chapter in the story of Stardust@home. With the launch of the new and improved Stardust@home Phase 2 volunteers ("dusters") will be able to search for interstellar dust particles at an unprecedented level of sensitivity. Even the subtlest tracks and particles, which may have eluded detection in the first phase of the project, now stand an excellent chance of being found by ever-vigilant dusters. August 10, 2007
Stardust Phase 2 Begins Today marks the beginning of a new and exciting chapter in the story of Stardust@home. With the launch of the new and improved Stardust@home Phase 2 volunteers ("dusters") will be able to search for interstellar dust particles at an unprecedented level of sensitivity. Even the subtlest tracks and particles, which may have eluded detection in the first phase of the project, now stand an excellent chance of being found by ever-vigilant dusters. July 27, 2007
The End of Phase 1 The move to Stardust@home Phase 2 is about to begin! We need to finish a few more tasks before we disable the VM, effectively bringing Phase 1 to a close. So we will be leaving the VM active through the weekend. We plan to disable the VM as well as testing and registration at 10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time on Monday, July 30th. July 24, 2007
ANNOUNCING PHASE TWO OF STARDUST@HOME We are announcing the beginning of an exciting second phase of the Stardust@home search. The Stardust@home volunteers have been incredibly successful at finding small, subtle features. We are now doubling the resolution of the focus movies. A whole new cosmic dust hunt will be on! June 8, 2007
Extraction Tests at JSC As we mentioned in the March 27th Update we are planning to extract candidate tracks identified by Stardust@home volunteers from the aerogel collector directly for analysis. We've just completed a round of testing our extraction equipment on the Stardust interstellar flight spare tray (a back-up tray manufactured for the Stardust mission just in case something went wrong with the first tray before launch). Mar 27, 2007
Extracting Candidates During the week of March 12th, most of the Stardust@home team were in Houston for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Dr. Westphal also stayed for the CAPTEM meeting. Dr. Westphal presented the latest from the Stardust@home project. This generated intense interest and excitement: people were very impressed with the dedication and hard work of the roughly 23,000 "dusters" -- you have collectively searched nearly 40,000,000 images. Mar 13, 2007
New Stardust@home Press Release This week, members of the Stardust@home Team are meeting at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. The program committee for the conference has chosen to highlight, in a press release, a talk about Stardust@home by the Project Director, Andrew Westphal. The talk will be given on 14 Mar 2007. You can read a scientific abstract of the talk here. Feb 14, 2007
Results from the Foil Unfolding Tests As was discussed in earlier updates, we have been conducting tests to determine if it will be feasible to fold back the aluminum foils on the backside of the Interstellar Dust Collector. The reason we want to be able to do this is so that we can better scan the collector with light being transmitted directly through the backside rather than shining light through the top and reflecting it back up with a mirror... Jan 29, 2007
New Candidate Reviews Thank you for your patience since our last news update. Although it might have seemed that way, we haven't been asleep. In fact, we've been incredibly busy with Stardust@home... Latest News: Aug. 1, 2006 - 8:33pm We have shut down the training, testing and VM section of the Stardust@home website because of a problem in which random images of unknown origin appear in the focus movies. We do not yet understand their origin, but they are not images of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector. Because of this, we have decided to suspend the training, testing and VM on the Stardust@home website until the problem is corrected. SPECIAL THANKS to our colleagues for bringing this to our attention by e-mailing us and posting to the forum! August 1, 2006 - 3:15pm After several glitches during the launch, the Stardust@home website is now tentatively in full service. We encountered hardware problems due, in part, to the high volume of traffic to our site. We are excited to see so many users on our site, unfortunately our server could not handle it. We were able to locate the problem and the Stardust@home server appears to be working once again. Should any other glitches come up, part of the site may need to be temporarily shut down in order to solve the problem as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience and happy dusting everyone! Stardust@home Team August 1, 2006Due to the unexpected large volume of traffic, our website might be slow or non-responsive. Everything on our website is functional but however, if you get the down page, please try again at a later time. We are working to solve this problem as soon as possible. Please be patient and thank you for your understanding, Stardust@home Team August 1, 2006Today we officially begin the Stardust@home project with real data. We are very excited—this is going to be fun! We now have digital focus movies from 11 aerogel tiles on the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector tray. These were scanned by our colleagues Ron Bastien and Jack Warren at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. As we launch the project, please bear these 3 things in mind:
Thank you and welcome! July 13, 2006For the past three months it has felt as though we are two weeks away from starting the project, and those two weeks never seem to shrink! But, we think that we are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. We have scanned more than 10 aerogel tiles in the Cosmic Dust Lab in Houston and have recently written a computer program that checks the focus on each of the 40,000 focus movies we have so far. We've found that we needed to go back to rescan a few of the tiles. We've set ourselves a target of having 12 complete tiles (about 50,000 focus movies) ready to search before we open the Virtual Microscope. We also need to finish development of parts of the website that are critical to the stardust search and the volunteers’ involvement. We are hoping to launch in the second half of July, if all goes well. As promised, we will send out one (and only one) e-mail announcement to our pre-registrants on the day we open registration and the Virtual Microscope for live searching. Stay tuned, and thank you again for your patience. June 14, 2006Scanning of the aerogel tiles is progressing at the Johnson Space Center. We are aiming to complete scanning and processing of 12 aerogel tiles before we launch the search. You can monitor our progress in the forum: Picture perfect: aerogel scanning progress. The testing, registration, and virtual microscope features of this website are not yet enabled. All other portions of the site are fully functional, including our Tutorial in the Stardust Search section, and the Message Board in the Community section. We highly encourage all potential volunteers to sign up for and use the message board. Pre-registration has ended. As we have promised, we will send out one email to all pre-registered volunteers when we launch the virtual microscope and image data from the Stardust interstellar dust collector. For all others, keep watching this site in the coming weeks for an announcement of the start of the search. June 12, 2006Following a slow start, the scanning of the Stardust aerogel is proceeding smoothly at the Johnson Space Center (JSC). Eight out of the 130 aerogel tiles have already been scanned, and four additional tiles are now scanned every week. At this rate, scanning the entire surface of the aerogel collector should take about 30 weeks. |
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