Stardust@home

Dear Friends,

Let’s first try to assume goodwill. In no way is the Stardust@home team purposely trying to ignore you, annoy you, or devalue you in any way. We are all keenly aware of your importance to this project. (In fact, I’m currently researching a way we can more officially recognize the Top 50 dusters from past search phases.) But there are some things you must try and understand.

For one, we’re all extremely busy. I for example am on at least eight other projects and am budgeted for a mere 5% time on Stardust at best. I try to get to these forums as much as I can, but sometimes I can only do that once a week. Actually, the funding source that has allowed me to be part of this project runs out this month, and if new funding cannot be found, it’s quite possible these forums will get even less attention.

I also recognize that we had originally stated that Phase 3 was going to be about new movies, and it was! But a turn of events (mainly the discovery of Orion’s unique composition) necessitated a new direction. However, we consider the timing a fortunate occurrence and it made Phase 3 something truly different from the previous searches.

We also know that many of you have the skills to find midnight tracks, but could you imagine what it would sound like in the scientific literature if we had mentioned that our search image and training were completely wrong, yet we didn’t re-train our team or re-examine our samples? It just wouldn’t fly, and therefore we MUST not only re-search old movies, but we also need to make sure all dusters are trained properly on what we are looking for.

Nevertheless, we completely understand your desire to search new movies and are making every effort to get those in the system as soon as possible. As Dr. Spencer (a truly dedicated and valued duster) has already pointed out, we’ve uploaded some already. But regardless, you will see old movies too, it simply can’t be avoided. And frankly, it was simply easier to start off by uploading old movies, since we already had them. Sometimes we forget what regular dusting is like, and so thanks for bringing to our attention again your desire and reasoning for wanting new movies.

Dr. Westphal has taken the time to address your concerns as well, and has posted an update in the blog here (which I’ve also pasted below). As he says, please bear with us. As John notes, our actions are driven by the need to do the science right, even if it’s tedious. After that, we do what we can with the resources we have, which are often not much.

Thank you for your understanding. Your value to this project is undeniable and we’d hate to lose you. But there are sound reasons for the choices we make even at the risk of being dull.

Dan

PS – we acknowledge all dusters since at one time or another they contributed.

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Phase I movies…

Many of you have noticed that we have been serving up older, Phase I movies for a few days. Although we know that this may have been frustrating to see familiar movies, it was important, to be sure that we were not missing some “midnight” tracks in the Phase I dataset. (We also know that many of you have the skills to find midnight tracks, but we need to reach the entire dusting audience and make sure all the old movies were looked at as well.) This is because the original data were viewed with calibration movies that, as you know, did not resemble midnight tracks. Thank you for your patience. It is very important that we identify every one of the midnight tracks. We may do this again for a few days at a time from time to time, or we may mix in older movies with new in order to determine detection efficiencies as a function of time. Please bear with us! Stardust@home is not the bottleneck in our overall ISPE project.

We have now switched back to serving up the newer movies. We are also in the process of uploading new scan data to the server. We will post to this blog when we have new movies up and available.

Thank you for your help!

Best,

Andrew Westphal
Stardust@home Director

I wish to thank you, DanZ and Dr. Westphal, for your detailed explanation of the problems and issues facing Stardust@home. It is sometimes difficult for those of us, like myself, who have never worked in the science field, to understand and appreciate the exacting nature of your work. I was also not aware, Dan, of how little time you actually have to spend on forum issues. The Stardust administration's willingness to compromise and to find a solution which works for everyone is greatly appreciated. I think I speak for all when I say we are eager to do our part, and need only a little advance warning and explanation when our dusting duties are about to change drastically. It is very difficult to do our jobs properly when we don't understand why we are doing them. Thanks again for the insight you have provided. Now, back to dusting....

Thank you Elaine, your thoughtful comments are much appreciated. We know we don't always make decisions or explain things from a duster's point of view, so you have given us much to think about as we move forward. Certainly we will do our best to give you more warning (and reasons) if there are additional major changes to come.

But we are convinced that there is a very good chance that there are more Orions still hidden in the old movies, just waiting to be discovered. And if anyone can find them, it's our veteran dusters!

Thanks again for your patience,

Dan

By the way, in case anyone wants to know why we still think more high-angle tracks can be found in the old movies, here are two important examples:

433711V1 (Note: please login to the VM beforehand to view)
In this example, only one of the posters in this thread found the track during Phase 2, although each of you looked at the slide multiple times. The track is in the upper left corner, and is heading in approximately the 1:30 direction on the clock.

7663035V1
This is Orion/Sirus. No one on this thread found it, although it was in a movie that was served up to almost all.

So, it's not that you couldn't find them, but more that you weren't really looking for this sort of thing at the time.

Along these lines, we are thinking about adding a feature that would allow dusters to get a report on their responses to all of the bona fide tracks that we know exist in the imagery. Would that be useful?

Otherwise, as always, thank you for your hard work!

Best,

Dan
On behalf of the Stardust@home team

Dan, I'm a bit confused. That first movie you mention is a Phase 1 movie with a Phase 1 number. What is its number in Phase 2?

elainekeefe wrote:Dan, I'm a bit confused. That first movie you mention is a Phase 1 movie with a Phase 1 number. What is its number in Phase 2?

Sorry to have taken so long to get back to you Elaine, but here's what I can tell you right now. As I think most of you know already, all Phase One movies that were re-done in hi-res for Phase Two were converted into four separate movies. So in the case of 433711V1, it became four movies in Phase Two, and the one with the track is 6634692V1. But what I'm not understanding at the moment is why neither is currently listed as a candidate. Perhaps this is a high-angle track that turned out to be a bit of the spacecraft or something like that and got removed from the candidate list. Anyway, I will find out and let you know!

Dan

Hi Elaine,

It appears the master list for the candidates page has 8 midnight tracks and 14 angled tracks, which equals 22. But the true current tally is more like 29 tracks, so some are indeed missing.

However, 433711V1/6634692V1 is another view of the same feature in 9834319V1, which is on the candidates page. It has not been extracted, but it is of likely spacecraft origin due to its trajectory.

One mystery down!

Dan