Slashdot Mirror
Stardust@Home Lets Public Search Grains of Dust
An anonymous reader writes "In a new project called Stardust@home, UC Berkeley researchers are inviting Internet users to help them search for a few dozen submicroscopic grains of interstellar dust captured by NASA's Stardust spacecraft. Rather than relying on the user's spare PC cycles, though, the system depends on their eyes." From the article: "Though Stardust's main mission was to capture dust from the tail of comet Wild 2 - dust dating from the origins of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago - it also captured a sprinkling of dust from distant stars, perhaps created in supernova explosions less than 10 million years ago."
Admittedly the search was for larger objects on Mars than the tiny flecks of space stuff from this mission.
At least 100000. See http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/
for those of you to lazy to read the entire thing, here is a link to the website http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
The Stardust@Home Project where you can pre-register and find out more.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Where is Stardust now?
"Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity" - Machine Beauty
Yiu're forgetting the all important category C) is able to do it. This is not something everyone can do, you have to be tested first to see if you can be part of the project.
I work with digital video images. People have been trying for years, if not decades, to write software that can mimic the capabilities of the human eye. Usually this software is needed for auto tracking and scoring objects in the field of view. Some limited success has been achieved, but even the best software needs a human to make the initial detection. The pattern recognition capabilities of the human eye are absolutely phenomenal. I doubt computer software will ever be able to replace us in this area.