Stardust@Home Lets Public Search Grains of Dust

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @10:29PM from the bad-excuses-to-get-out-of-a-date dept.

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."

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Is it just me... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-01-10 22:41 · Score: 5, Funny

...or is distributed computing itself being overdistributed? If they keep it up, everyone will be running a completely unique @home program by themselves, defeating the entire purpose. :P
NASA have already used internet users' eyeballs by Trisha-Beth · 2006-01-10 22:53 · Score: 5, Informative

Admittedly the search was for larger objects on Mars than the tiny flecks of space stuff from this mission.