mikecaulfield 's List: Caroline Moore, POSS, and the New Old Pro-Am Future

The original phase ran from November 2000 to September 2001, identifying and classifying the age of craters on Mars images from Viking Orbiter that had already been analyzed by NASA. The goal was to answer two meta-science questions:

Is the public ready, willing, and able to help science?Does this new way of powering science analysis produce results that are just as good as the traditional way?

In February 2001 clickworkers started processing new images from Mars Global Surveyor, surveying small craters never before cataloged. Clickworkers also searched Mars images for "honeycomb" terrain, although no further images were discovered and it is suspected that this is an illusory feature type. Their analysis might potentially be useful for scientists, although there are no specific plans for using it yet.

From February to May 2000 and from August to December 2002, the Stardust spacecraft exposed its "Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector" (SIDC), a set of aerogel blocks about 0.1 m² (1 ft²) in total size, to interstellar dust. The collector media consist of 130 blocks of 1 and 3 cm thick silica-based aerogel mounted in aluminum cells.[1]In order to spot impacts of interstellar dust, just over 700,000 individual fields of the aerogel will have to be visually inspected using large magnification.[2] Each field, which is composed of 40 images, will thus be termed a "focus movie." Stardust@home will try to achieve this by distributing the work among volunteers. Unlike distributed computing projects, it does not try to harness the processing power of many computers. It uses them only to distribute and present the tasks to humans. This approach is similar to the earlier Clickworkers project to find Martian craters.Participants must pass a test to qualify to register to participate. After registering and passing the test, participants have access to the web-based "virtual microscope" which allows them to search each field for interstellar dust impacts by focusing up and down with a focus control.As an incentive for volunteers, Stardust@home will allow the first individual to discover a particular interstellar dust particle to name it. Also, the discoverer will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper announcing the discovery of the particle.

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