Monday, January 16, 2006
"Public to look for dust grains in Stardust detectors"
"'Twenty or 30 years ago, we would have hired a small army of microscopists who would be hunched over microscopes focusing up and down through the aerogel looking for the tracks of these dust grains,' said Westphal. '""Instead, we developed an automated microscope to scan the aerogel and hope to use volunteers we have trained and tested to search for these tracks.'
The Web-based virtual microscope will be made available to the public in mid-March, even before all the scans have been completed in a cleanroom at Houston's Johnson Space Center. In all, Westphal expects to need some 30,000 person hours to look through the scanned images at least four times." another nonofficial Stardust site
