Stardust@home

September 10, 2006 5:57 PM

Stardust@home is now finally working in the search for dust specks from the stardust mission. Previously here and here
posted by scodger (9 comments total)

It's been going since the start of August, but for some reason I didn't get an email telling me signups had opened despite preregistering.

You will have to pass a test first, and after that you can stare at blurry photographs of aerogel as mu8ch as you could ever want.
posted by scodger at 6:11 PM on September 10, 2006

Is the communal aspect a form of science-geek viral marketing or something? I mean, don't they have computers for that sort of thing?
posted by facetious at 6:13 PM on September 10, 2006

The problem is the variability of the tracks and the other crud that is on the gel. Have a look at the samples and you can tell it would be pretty hard to get a computer to do this automatically.
Either that or they figured that free labour is cheaper than a decent programmer.
posted by scodger at 6:20 PM on September 10, 2006

10/10. I challenge you all to beat that score. :P
posted by taursir at 6:28 PM on September 10, 2006

Holy cats thats hard. What ever happened to the days of loading some stupid ass screensaver on your PC, wasting electricity, wasting cycles, and saying, "Yeah, my PC is looking for aliens."
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:19 PM on September 10, 2006

Fantastic idea. Creative solution to a difficult technical problem.

I think a 2 minute narrated video clip in the tutorial would go further than all those slides.

Whatever it is they want you to see in those pictures, I'm just simply not seeing it.
posted by Ynoxas at 9:24 PM on September 10, 2006

They want you to find the holes in the gel. They are asking you to focus slightly inside the gel surface, as there will be a sharp hole, and nothing else in focus.

I am doing it by focusing on the surface, looking at what dust is there, and then zooming a couple of pics into the gel, looking for holes but making sure im taking into account the dust on the surface.
posted by scodger at 10:37 PM on September 10, 2006

The Clickworkers program is pretty similar, except there you're finding and classifying craters on Mars,
posted by Zero Gravitas at 6:43 AM on September 11, 2006

10/10. I challenge you all to beat that score. :P

Can't beat it, but I can match it.
posted by DakotaPaul at 1:03 PM on September 11, 2006