There has been a wave of distributed computing projects over the years. The first big public one was SETI@Home, the search for extraterrestrial radio signals from intelligent beings. (Although, some may argue that that crown should be given to GIMPS, the search for ever larger Mersenne Primes). Sometimes associated with wacky UFO dreamers that call Art Bell nightly, and othertimes applauded for it’s novel approach to a huge issue: How to sort through infinitely long radios streams on infinitely many channels, to possibly find someone else out there.

Eventually, the concept started to catch on. Cancer research, AIDS research, protein folding, artificial intelligence, Riemann Zeta functions… you name it, there was some kind of distributed computing project for it.

Stardust@Home doesn’t use your computer to process data, it uses your eyes. It uses everyones eyes to scan a sheet of aerogel at microscopic levels to find interstellar dust.

On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft’s sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust’s dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004 and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originate in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such pristine particles ever collected in space, and scientists are eagerly waiting for their chance to “get their hands” on them.

Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains will have to be found. This will not be easy. Unlike the thousand of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists estimate that Stardust collected only around 45 interstellar dust particles. They are tiny—only about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size! These miniscule particles are embedded in an aerogel collector 1,000 square centimeters in size. To make things worse the collector plates are interspersed with flaws, cracks, and an uneven surface. All this makes the interstellar dust particles extremely difficult to locate.

If we were doing this project twenty years ago, we would have searched for the tracks through a high-magnification microscope. Because the view of the microscope is so small, we would have to move the microscope more than 1.6 million times to search the whole collector. In each field of view, you would focus up and down by hand to look for the tracks. This is so much work, that even starting twenty years ago, we would still be doing it today!

I’ve been waiting for this project to finally start, as it’s been delayed a few times over the last year. But it finally started last week, and I have given several goes to the image viewer. I can’t stare at the images for too long, but I can give it a few minutes a day. I like the direction that it takes us. I mean, the search for interstellar dust is neat and all, but what I really mean is the way it is taking distributed “computing” to another level.