Having too much time? Try Stardust@Home.

Have you ever worked on image pattern recognition? Forget about it. One of the most ambitious space exploring projects, Stardust, prefers people’s eyeballs then computers to find tiny interstellar dusts captured in an aerogel collector returned from deep space. NASA’s Stardust group digitally scanned the entire aerogel with microscopes. Volunteers of Stardust@Home can view the huge image database to find the small particles. The reward is: the dusts will be named after the founders. Even more, the finder of the first dust will be a co-author of their paper. Gosh, that could be a Nature or Science paper. I can envision a big group of grad students give up their research and staring at monitors. There might be a temporary drought in academic activities. Ok, bye now. I’ll login Stardust@Home to look for my joechao#1 dust.

(Ps. See related reports at space.com and New Scientist.)