How much time should I spend on Stardust@home?

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bmendez
Stardust@home Team
Stardust@home Team
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How much time should I spend on Stardust@home?

Post by bmendez »

Q: How much time should I spend on Stardust@home?

A:
The search for interstellar dust tracks in the Stardust aerogel collector will take upwards of 7 months. That's how long it will take to completely scan the entire aerogel collector with our automated microscope at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. You can monitor the progress of the scanning in our Updates forum: Picture Perfect.

By the time we are done scanning we expect there to be around 700,000 focus movies in total. In order to efficiently search through all of these focus movies we should probably have each movie looked at around 10 times (that number will be refined as the project progresses).

We currently have just over 10,000 registered volunteers for the Stardust@home project. If we assume that each volunteer can look at an average of 3 focus movies per minute, then each volunteer needs to spend about 4 hours each over the course of the 7 months. That works out to roughly an average of 1 minute per day (or half and hour per month) per volunteer!

Everyone is welcome to do more, if they wish. There are no limits! But, one minute per day is all we are really asking for. We appreciate every minute you spend because it brings us that much closer to finding the very first samples of contemporary interstellar dust.
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