Stardust@home

The quotes from the www.museumofhoaxes.com post are taken directly from a news article "Stardust@home battles early glitches" published in Nature just 2 days after we launched. This is a good, honest appraisal of the project at that time. Nothing to do with the recent updates.


-Anna

Hi The two Stardust collectors were mounted back to back on a single deployment arm. There was nothing in between the backs of the aerogel tiles, but no impacts from either side penetrated all of the way through (tracks that large would have been seen during the initial documentation stage back in J...

Here are some of the movies we have picked out to review. We emphasize that interesting candidates are just that. We have learned from working with the Stardust Cometary collector that it is very difficult to identify tracks while the aerogel is still in the collector frame. We can only be sure abou...

Please see our update on the "cheating" issue http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=874 We can confirm that a small number of volunteers have been boosting their scores by spending their time on calibrations and not the real movies. We can spot this activity in our d...

Several colleagues pointed out on the forum that people could "cheat" by advancing rapidly through the real movies to the calibration movies. Although the "cheaters" only cheat themselves out of an opportunity to find a real interstellar dust particle, we did want to find them so...

Many of you have been wondering when and how we are looking at movies that have been clicked on. Firstly, we've picked out the top 100 movies with the current highest scores, meaning those with the greatest number of agreements, and we've looked at the focus movies. From those movies we selected a s...

1920 Bad Focus movies have been retired from the VM today. Those retired were the most obvious cases, having 'Bad Focus' or 'No Track' clicked by almost everyone who has viewed them. There will still be a number of movies that are bad focus, since this is an unavoidable aspect of automated scanning ...

Sorry everyone.

This sensitivity = specificity bug was a little mix-up in the VM this morning.
It's been fixed and will push through to the servers in a few minutes.
Your scores should return to normal very soon.


Thanks for the rapid feedback!


-Anna

Tile I007 uploaded last night and the movies were made available this morning [9Aug06] Tile I033 is uploaded and available for searching [10Aug06] Many of you following the project since May will already know that scanning thousands of fields of view over the aerogel and producing focus movies is a ...

Hi

This is a problem where the movie seems to have very few frames.


The VM is functioning correctly. The problem was caused in processing the focus movie.

The answer is to click Bad Focus.


Thanks
Anna

The countdown has begun and we are ready to launch! After months of delays we are finally ready to begin our search for interstellar particles of dust trapped in the aerogel collector from NASA's Stardust mission! The project will officially begin at 11:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) on August 1s...

Hi Sharqua A question comes to mind: Anna, how does the team plan to remove the dust you/we find once it's found? A super-tiny needle? A jackhammer? Inquiring minds want to know! -Shar Welcome to our stock-in trade at Space Sciences Lab! Long before Andrew came up with the Stardust@home project, our...

Nikita - :lol: Wolter, fjgiie - Hi. Yes, you're both right. The lighting is an issue for us. We imaged the Mir and lab aerogel in our lab in Berkeley with all the tricks we've learned in imaging aerogel: reflected light, side lighting and a mirror underneath gives the best possible contrast. The int...

Hi folks just a note to confirm a couple of things: We will open the test at the same time as we launch the Virtual Microscope (VM). Part of the reason is that we are remaking the test to include Stardust focus movies, replacing those from laboratory shots and aerogel flown on Mir that we used in al...

We've updated the Virtual Microscope tutorial http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ss_tutorial_start.php Only View #11 has changed - we've made it harder. The new movie is actually Stardust interstellar dust collector aerogel, but we've digitally added a very small track. Since we don't know what ...