The Stardust Interstellar Collector, comprising 132 cells of aerogel bound by aluminum foils, is curated at Johnson Space Center, Houston TX. Scientists there remove the aerogel tiles and scan them using an optical microscope. You can see their progress at NASA JSC Curation, Interstellar Tray. The JSC curation site has some great information on Stardust (note it requires Adobe Flash).
JSC scientists send the aerogel scan data to Berkeley and we produce the focus movies for Stardust@home. This graphic shows how much of the collector has been scanned and is currently being searched by our volunteers using the Stardust@home Virtual Microscope.
Updated: March 14, 2016
