Stardust at Home News

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bobw

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I pre-registered when I first heard and it has been a while. Today when I logged in to see the latest news I found this. Things are looking up! They have links to the tutorial session (I decided to post the news here before clicking), a message board, and hopefully soon some stardust microscope movies to look at.<br /><br />http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/news.php<br /><br /><font color="yellow"><b>News</b><br />May 17, 2006<br /><br />Today we are rolling out the Mark 2 version of the Stardust@home website. Unfortunately, we are not able to begin the actual stardust search today as we have not been able to collect enough image data from the automated scanning microscope. There have been several technical difficulties with the microscope that have caused this delay. Because of this, the testing, registration, and virtual microscope features of this website are not yet enabled.<br /><br />All other portions of the site are fully functional, including our Tutorial in the Stardust Search section, and the Message Board in the Community section. We highly encourage all potential volunteers to sign up for and use the message board.<br /><br />Pre-registration has now ended. As we have promised, we will send out one email to all pre-registered volunteers when we launch the virtual microscope and image data from the Stardust interstellar dust collector. </font><br /><br />Edit:<br />Well, it turns out that the tutorial section has a functional microscope simulator and about ten movies. There are about 40 images per movie and the focus adjustment switches between the various depths pretty smoothly. Reminds me of Biology class. The download time is pretty reasonable on dial-up so it should be lightning fast on broadband. I'm starting to get excited about finding a fleck of stardust myself!<br /><br /><font color="yellow"> For the following training tutorial,</font> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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harmonicaman

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I carefully went through the tutorial exercise and I found it very, very difficult to distinguish between the actual particle tracks, and the scratches and other debris and non-particle marks on the Aerogel.<br /><br />I think they need to produce several clear graphic descriptions showing exactly how the true particle tracks will present themselves on the Aerogel.<br /><br />Is the "Test" ready yet?<br /><br />I'll give it a go, but I don't think I'll score very high...
 
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bobw

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I read that they want to have at least a dozen tiles converted to movies before they go live. They don't want to run out of movies once they start. The test and sign-up won't be ready until then.<br /><br />The tutorials had labels telling when we were above, at, and below the surface. I don't think the real movies will have that but I could be wrong. It seemed to me that the trick to finding a track was that the circular hole was in focus, sort of, all the way down once I got below the surface. It can't be perfect focus because it is looking through the aerogel but I could definately see a good circle. The circle seemed to move, too, indicating that the track was not perfectly perpendicular to the surface. Conversely, the dust and crud on the surface seemed in focus only in a few of the pictures and was definately blurry above and below those. <br /><br />Maybe my biology classes in college helped me understand the tracks more easily. Blastulas and somites are three dimensional and you can't focus on them all at once, you sort of have to remember what the top looked like as you focus down and mentally add the "slices" to visualize the whole thing. Just remember, if it stays in focus as you move up and down then it is a continuous hole. You'll do OK. One of the scientists wrote that it should only take a few seconds to scan a movie and find a track once we get the hang of it. <br /><br />This project definately sounds like work to me. With folding at home you turn on the computer and you are done. Stardust is interactive. I don't think I am going to be able to spend hours at a time looking at those movies, my brain will fry. I am thinking in terms of a couple a night when I get home from work and then call it quits. If I pass the test, and if my proficiency rating is good, that is. They plan on sending us about 20% known movies so they can rate us on "click accuracy"; if I don't score well they'll ignore my results. LOL That part is mostly to thwart <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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bobw

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http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=93<br /><br /><font color="yellow">Get ready for some detail <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /><br />When the project ends we will have scanned about 5000 focus movies per aerogel tile. Right now we're getting about 4000 movies per tile, because we're leaving out the edges. We have to go back and do the edges later because they need a different focal range.<br /><br /><br />It takes about 20 hours to automatically scan one tile of aerogel and stream 4000 40-frame movies to a hard drive. We do no processing during the scan. Instead, we process the movies off-line to keep up the speed and reproducibility.<br /><br />The hard drive full of raw movies is shipped to Berkeley. Here we convert each one into a stack of about 40 individual images (the focus movie) formatted ready for our Virtual Microscope browser. The process is automated, and also takes about 20 hours to produce 4000 focus movies.<br /><br />The final step is to upload the 4000 focus movies to Amazon S3, from where they are served up to your web-browser. At the same time, information for each focus movie is entered into our database at Berkeley. This combined step takes about 8 hours.<br /><br /><br />As you can see, there's quite a bit of lag time between scanning and having focus movies ready for searching. That's why we want a buffer of 12 tiles (12 x 4000 movies) completely ready before we launch.</font>/safety_wrapper> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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earth_bound_misfit

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Hi Bob, does this mean your pulling some resources from folding at home? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------- </p><p>Wanna see this site looking like the old SDC uplink?</p><p>Go here to see how: <strong>SDC Eye saver </strong>  </p> </div>
 
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bobw

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Not at all. They can't use computers to find the tracks, only people can do it, so there is no precessor time involved. It's just a webpage and you look at the pictures. I can do it while I fold without slowing down any more than reading these posts slows folding down. <br /><br />I'm not recruiting or anything, in fact I probably won't post any more updates here. I just thought people might be interested in the latest developments. It sure is something different! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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earth_bound_misfit

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Cool! I was thinking that with the title, it was like folding at home. On a side note, did you see our team has gone up a spot? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------- </p><p>Wanna see this site looking like the old SDC uplink?</p><p>Go here to see how: <strong>SDC Eye saver </strong>  </p> </div>
 
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bobw

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I noticed that 5 teams are scheduled to pass us in 1.1 months while we will only pass one team in that time. I was wondering if Einstein at Home got some of our former teammates <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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harmonicaman

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THE STARDUST HUNT IS ON! <br /><br />Excerpt:<br /><br />Beginning at 2 p.m. ET Tuesday, you'll be able to click into the Stardust @ Home Web site and start scanning the actual photomicrographs of interstellar-dust collectors from NASA's Stardust probe. Using a novel "virtual microscope," you can look for the telltale trails of bits that embedded themselves in Stardust's fluffy cubes of aerogel.<br /><br />
 
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mikeemmert

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This is a great project, thanks for reporting on it.<br /><br />I have a question. Have the samples been exposed to air at any point? There is a thread on this problem with regard to the lunar samples (800 pounds of moon samples ruined). It's tough to get a hard vacuum in a laboratory, and especially the aerogel would adsorb some air which would be hard to purge. This would obviously affect studies of the ratios of oxygen 16/17/18 isotopes and nitrogen 14/15, as well as the noble gases.<br /><br />There are lots of science projects, no one person can keep up with them all. My own project creates an interest in isotopes of hydrogen, helium, and lithium in samples from the Kuiper belt. I have wound up looking for evidence that there is another star in our neighborhood, which I didn't think would be a question when I started that project.
 
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bobw

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I remember reading that they had to modify the lab to protect the aerogel from the fire extinguisher system without impeding the flow of filtered air. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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mikeemmert

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Thanks for the picture, bobw. Don't worry, we no longer behead the messenger carrying the bad news.<br /><br />Looks like they're going to have to spend the big buck$ making vacuum laboratories for future missions. Live and learn, right? And they'll need to make a new vacuum lab for each mission. Europa and Enceladus samples need to be kept strictly apart, for example. All surfaces in such a lab need to be purged of all gases.<br /><br />I wouldn't call the samples ruined. There's an awful lot of good science that can be done on them. Unfortunately, the project I wanted is not possible. I'll try not to be bitter... <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> ...tomorrow will be a better day!<br /><br />I wonder if they used to smell like gunpowder?
 
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fragrance

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Now I think Stardust @ home gets too many visiters. I could not visited its websute now. It always show the message :<br /><br /><font color="blue">Today we officially begin the Stardust@home project with real data. <br /><br />Due to the unexpected large volume of traffic, our website might be slow or non-responsive. If you are receiving this message, please try again at a later time. <br /><br />We are working to solve this problem as soon as possible. Please be patient and thank you for your understanding, <br /><br />Stardust@home Team </font><br /><br />The only thing I could do is waitting. <br />Anyone here pass the test? Get busy with the search work?<br /><br />Cheers<br />
 
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fragrance

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There must be something wrong, the website shut down all the testing and VM section. Sad that, I can not take the test. Some one in the stardust MB said there are some random photos such as supermarket, boys and girls instead of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector. <br />Hope everything will be all right soon.
 
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brellis

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hi borman<br /><br />Thanks again for an engaging post. You're clearly an excellent thinker, and you do people like me a great favor by opening up your thought process in your posts. In the case of your previous post, I deign to offer some input:<br /><br /><font color="yellow">While the organic argument makes some sense, the number of comets needed to fill the oceans to just intersect Earth's orbit in the vast emptiness of space should mean space should still be rather filled with comets that did not intersect any planet or the sun. The absense of such a dense "comet storm" is one reason for doubting the assumption that Earth's water dervied mainly from comet strikes.</font><br /><br />The "comet storm" may have hit, and little cometary iceballs may continue to replenish the oceans today, according to Louis Frank's small comet theory. Where is the rest of it? Earth withstood several major collisions - one that created the moon, one that probably killed the dinosaurs, etc. Mars has taken a few for the team as well, including one that might have sent life to earth, according to one theory. The entire asteroid belt is itself possibly the shattered remains of a would-be planet that would have orbited between Mars and Jupiter. How much of the "comet storm" is frozen in the moons of Jupiter?<br /><br /><font color="yellow">A more likely scenario has it that comets and planets have a common ancester, possibly planetismals. Some collided into a large scale body to make a planet that then proceeded to fractionate isotopes and others collided but lost the momentum race to form a larger body and some of the smaller watery parts became comets.</font><br /><br />In another thread, I asked if Enceladus would be considered a comet if it weren't orbiting Saturn. The answers <i>gravitated</i> <img src="/images/icons/rolleyes.gif" />(sorry, couldn't resist!) around the size; at a certain size, wh <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font size="2" color="#ff0000"><em><strong>I'm a recovering optimist - things could be better.</strong></em></font> </p> </div>
 
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bobw

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The stardust at home scientists have decided to divide each focus movie into four segments enabling higher resolution data for the online searchers. From what I can find there is still no definite verification that an interstellar dust particle has been found.<br /><br /><font color="yellow">The Cosmic Dust Laboratory will be shut down to interstellar tray scanning for about two months starting next week to catch up on allocations of interplanetary dust particles (IDPs). During this time, we will modify the scanning system to accommodate a micromanipulator -- the main job is machining a new mounting plate for the interstellar tray -- then we will practice doing extractions of ''picokeystones'' on the Stardust interstellar flight spare tray. These will enable us to image the tracks, and determine trajectories. The next steps will depend on what we find! </font><br /><br />The image is from the webpage below. It has more pictures of the small "keystone" piece of aerogel but I can't make heads or tails of it. The extraction is from the cometary dust side, not the interstellar dust side. <br /><br />http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?p=12974<br /><br />Image caption: Extraction at Berkeley of a keystone from a tile on the Stardust cometary dust collector. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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