ANNOUNCING PHASE TWO OF STARDUST@HOME

[bmendez]

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!

After 11 months of diligent searching by thousands of volunteers we have identified several dozen candidate interstellar dust particles. We emphasize that at this time these are still only candidates; some, all, or none of these may be interstellar dust particles. We are carrying out a careful process of extracting these candidate particles at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. The pace of this process is slow and careful because this is an absolutely unique, practically irreplaceable set of samples. We must do it right the first time.

We halted the scanning of the Stardust interstellar dust tray in Houston a couple of months ago, with about one-third of the tray scanned. We did this so that the lab where the interstellar dust tray is being scanned, the so-called “Cosmic Dust Labâ€