Sifting Through Stardust

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Hal Stucker -- School Library Journal, 2/15/2006

"We are all star stuff," declared the late astronomer Carl Sagan. If you're among those still wondering what exactly star stuff is, you may now have the opportunity to help discern this mystery in a unique science experiment.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are inviting Internet users around the world to help search for the few dozen submicroscopic grains of interstellar detritus brought back by Stardust, the NASA spacecraft that returned to Earth January 15.

After a seven-year jaunt of almost three billion miles through the solar system, Stardust—which was sent aloft on a mission to rendezvous with the comet Wild 2 and collect small rocks and dust particles from its tail—successfully landed in the Utah dessert with its cargo of samples.

While the spacecraft's meeting with Wild 2 got most of the attention, Stardust had another mission as well—collection of, well, actual stardust. In 1993, the Galileo spacecraft discovered a stream of interstellar dust from stars light-years away, entering our solar system from deep space. Stardust passed through this dust stream, snaring samples of the cosmic debris on its way.

However, the stardust samples are much smaller and vastly fewer in number than the samples from the comet. So researchers have launched the Stardust@Home project, which will allow anyone with net access to help them conduct a virtual search of the spacecraft's collector to find the samples.

Andrew Westphal, associate director of Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at UC Berkeley, is the developer of the Stardust@Home project. He and other SSL researchers are now using an automated microscope to scan and digitally photograph the collector's aerogel (a rubbery, silicon-based collection medium 100 times lighter than water).

Web users can visit the Stardust@Home site, take a short training course, and then download a "virtual microscope" program, which they can use to search through some of the 1.5 million pictures, each covering an area no larger than a grain of salt. As a special reward, Westphal says the people who are lucky enough to discover an interstellar dust grain will get to name it.

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