Stardust@home

Stardust@home is a citizen science project that encourages volunteers to search images for tiny interstellar dust impacts.

[1] In order to spot impacts of interstellar dust, just over 700,000 individual fields of the aerogel will have to be visually inspected using large magnification.

As an incentive for volunteers, the first five phases of Stardust@home allowed the first individual to discover a particular interstellar dust particle to name it.

As of 2023, numerous peer-reviewed papers summarizing the results of the Stardust Interstellar Preliminary Examination (ISPE) that include these volunteers as co-authors have been published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

The scoring method was also upgraded and, unlike the other phases, Stardust@home can no longer guarantee first finders of particles will be listed as co-authors on any scientific papers written about the discoveries.

Stardust@home logo
This focus movie shows what a particle track in the stardust aerogel might look like. The focus movie can be viewed in the Stardust Search Tutorial with the "virtual microscope". The tutorials use tracks of extraterrestrial particles that were captured in the ODCE collector on the Russian space station Mir and tracks of submicrometre dust particles shot into aerogel at 20 km/s using a Van de Graaff dust accelerator in Heidelberg, Germany . Real interstellar dust tracks may appear different from these. They may be deeper or shallower, wider or narrower.