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Stardust@home: A massively distributed public search for interstellar dust in the Stardust Interste
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| In January 2006, the Stardust mission will return the first samples from a solid solar-system body beyond the Moon. Stardust was in the news in January 2004, when it encountered comet Wild2 and captured a sample of cometary dust. But Stardust carries an equally important payload: the first samples of contemporary interstellar dust ever collected. Stardust uses aerogel collectors to capture dust samples. Identification of interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector probably cannot be automated, but will require the expertise of the human eye. However, the labor required for visual scanning of the entire collector would exceed the resources of any reasonably-sized research group. Here we propose to develop a project to recruit the public in the search for interstellar dust, based in part on the wildly popular SETI@home project, which has five million subscribers. We call the project Stardust@home. |
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