Gareth Branwyn reports in Street Tech: "You likely already know about Seti@Home and Folding@Home, but did you know that you'll soon have the opportunity to rummage through intersellar dirt at home, thanks to UC Berkeley's Stardust@Home project?
"When the Stardust spacecraft returns to Earth later this week (Sunday), its dust-bag will be filled with what it vaccumed out of the tail of comet Wild 2. While bringing this material back home is exciting enough, the spacecraft will also have a few grains of interstellar dust in its hoppers. And that's where Stardust@Home comes in. Scientists only expect to find 45 or so grains of such dust in the craft's collectors, creating a needle in a haystack scenario. So they decided to use the distributed eyeballs of the Internet to help speed the search. They've created a Virtual Microscope which will allow volunteer researchers to digitally scan the aerogel tiles where the submicroscopic grains have been trapped. Scientists hope that by finding and studying this interstellar dust, they can learn more about the internal processes of the supernova, flaring red giants, and neutron stars that would likely produce such dust." Link
