Hey kids, are you someone who always wanted to contribute to science, but never knew how to go about it?
Well, now you can. Join Stardust@home.
This is not a program that runs on your computer like Seti@home. The Stardust team is essentially reaching out for volunteers to scan through millions of 3D slices of Aerogel that was sent into space to collect interstellar particles. These particles are microscopic and are best found by looking for the little trails they left when hitting the aerogel.
If you take part in the program, you basically just run an app in your browser that acts like a virtual microscope. You zoom in and out through a slice, looking for telltale signs of a particle track. If you find a candidate, you click on it, and it gets marked. Marking a slide moves it up in the rankings. If enough other people agree with you, the slice gets escalated to the Stardust scientists, who will look at it and attempt to verify it.
One of the cool things about this is that the Stardust team is using the public as sort of an evolvving computing brain. They actually don’t know what the tracks will look like. They know sort of what they should be, but not exactly. So as part of signing up, you go through a short training series which teaches you the kind of things to look for. They then hope that the tens of thousands of volunteers will act as a large hive mind, learning what to look for as they go. The more people that agree on a track, the more likely it is to be real. And as time goes on, by analyzing the patterns of choices the public is making, they can tweak and tune the training to improve performance.
If you discover a particle, you will have your name recorded as co-author of the paper written to describe it. In addition, they’ve set the system up as a game to some extent - there are high scores, they track your accuracy rate (they inject slides of known tracks or known non-tracks, and if you correctly identify them your score goes up.)
Anyway, if you take part it’s fun (even addictive), and you’re getting to do real science. Give it a tray: Stardust@home.
Here’s a good FAQ from the Planetary Society.
If enough people here take part, we can use this thread to share scores and tips for spotting tracks and for helping newbies who can’t figure out what to do.