http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/background.html
Finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) will be extremely difficult. Because dust detectors on the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft have detected interstellar dust streaming into the solar system, we know there should be about 45 interstellar dust impacts in the SIDC. These impacts can only be found using a high-magnification microscope with a field of view smaller than a grain of salt. But the aerogel collector that we have to search enormous by comparison, about a tenth of a square meter (about a square foot) in size. The job is roughly equivalent to searching for 45 ants in an entire football field, one 5cm by 5cm (2 inch by 2 inch) square at a time! More than 1.6 million individual fields of view will have to searched to find the interstellar dust grains. We estimate that it would take more than twenty years of continuous scanning for us to search the entire collector by ourselves.
That is why WE NEED YOU. Volunteers are absolutely critical to the success of this project.
Sur ce site la NASA recrute des dizaines de milliers de volontaires pour l'aider à analyser les échantillons de poussières de comète.Il faut savoir que l'analyse de l'aérogel revient à trouver quelques fourmis sur un terrain de Football décomposé en carrés de qq cm de coté!
Les personnes seront soumises à un test de compétence sur internet et les découvreurs de grains dans l'aérogel seront mentionnés dans la publication finale de l'équipe!
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