Update: 13 Mar 2007 - New Stardust@home Press Release

[bmendez]

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: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/1457.pdf

In other updates, many of you have probably noticed a change in the calibration movies that contain simulated tracks. We have long been concerned that because those calibration movies suffered from a larger amount of compression artifacts than regular movies that they were too recognizable. Our fear was that this was introducing a bias into the sensitivity statistics. We have been replacing those older calibration movies with new ones that have less compression. After a couple weeks worth of data we have found no measureable change in the sensitivity statistics of the volunteers. This gives us great confidence that the calibration movies are giving us the measurements we had intended.

As always, thank you all for your tremendous efforts.