Stardust@home

From Networked Advocacy

University of California researchers invited the public to help search for approximately 45 grains of interstellar dust caught by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

"...[Researchers at the] Space Sciences Laboratory have created a "virtual microscope" that will allow anyone with an Internet connection to scan some of the 1.5 million pictures of the aerogel for tracks left by speeding dust. Each picture will cover an area smaller than a grain of salt," the Berkeley News wrote in January 2006.

"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," Associate Director of the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory Andrew Westphal told the paper. "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 public has skills to share, and many online tools make 'crowdsourcing' increasingly possible and profitable.