Update: 10 Aug 2007 - Stardust Phase 2 Begins

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bmendez
Stardust@home Team
Stardust@home Team
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Location: UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab
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Update: 10 Aug 2007 - Stardust Phase 2 Begins

Post by bmendez »

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 out and investigated by ever-vigilant dusters.

The new search will proceed much like Phase 1. The Virtual Microscope (VM) displays stacks of images (focus movies) of microscope scans of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Aerogel Collector, and dusters determine if they see a track, no track, or if the movie has bad focus. But now some of the Phase 2 focus movies are twice the magnification of the Phase 1 movies.


Phase 2 will be much more challenging. During Phase 1, dusters proved that they could find amazingly subtle features in the collector, so the calibration movies that we use to measure efficiency will have much more subtle features in them. Expect it to be more difficult to achieve high scores, and for your sensitivity and specificity to be lower than in Phase 1. This is on purpose.

Phase 1 dusters should review our new Tutorial pages and also review the current list of candidate particle tracks.

For all dusters who participated in Phase 1 you can still view your Phase 1 events from your My Eventspage, and see a listing of all those who had achieved a rank in the top 100 during Phase 1.

For all communications with fellow dusters and the Stardust@home Team please use the Stardust@home Bulletin Board.

We are extremely grateful for your contributions to this project and are excited to begin this new phase.
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