We are big fans of citizen science! Of course, science is always cool, and STEM/STEAM projects are an increasing part of everyone’s work and school experiences. So understanding how science works is not just cool, not just fun, but a good way to understand what is going on in the world around us all.

So we are sharing some cool science you can do, contributing toward large projects, and learning new things. Maybe you can use this today; maybe you will save it for later. As long as you enjoy some exploration and learning new things – citizen science is for you! And it is definitely something you can use to bring some good programming to your library.

This week we are admiring a very cool project: Stardust@home.

“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 originated in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such contemporary interstellar dust particles ever collected in space and returned to Earth for study.

Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains have to be found. As we have discovered since we started the Stardust@home project in 2006, this is not easy. Unlike the thousands of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists originally estimated that Stardust would collect only around 45 interstellar dust particles. After a thorough search of about one-third of the collector, we have so far found only four particles that appear to be interstellar. So they are incredibly rare and precious. 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 typical laboratory microscope of the era. Because the view of the microscope is so small, we would have had to move the microscope more than 1.6 million times to search the whole collector. And in each field of view, we would have had to 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!

This is where you come in:

Since we cannot do this by ourselves, we are asking for help from talented volunteers like you from all over the world. Of course, we can’t invite hundreds of people to our lab to do this search-we only have two microscopes! To find the elusive particles , therefore, we are using an automated scanning microscope to automatically collect images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector at the Curatorial Facility at Johnson Space Center in Houston. We call these stacks of images focus movies. All in all there will be nearly a million such focus movies. These are available to Stardust@home users like you around the world. You can then view them with the aid of a specialVirtual Microscope (VM) that works in your web browser.

Together, you and thousands of other Stardust@home participants will find the first pristine interstellar dust particles ever brought to Earth.

In recognition of the critical importance of the Stardust@home volunteers, the discoverer of an interstellar dust particle appears as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home team announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer also has the privilege of naming the particle! Each particle, as it is discovered, will be given some kind of alpha-numeric identifier (an address of sorts) for book-keeping purposes. But the name that people will actually call each particle will be given to it by its discoverer. For example, Bruce Hudson of Ontario, Canada, discovered our first candidate interstellar dust track. Its official NASA “phone number” is “I1043,1,30,0,0” – which is very hard to remember and doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. So we asked Bruce to give it a name to publish it by, and he decided on “Orion”, and then later “Sirius” for the accompanying upstream particle that was discovered very nearby. Bruce was featured in a recent article in Nature on Citizen Science projects. To also recognize the efforts of our volunteers who work hard, but may not have found a particle, we will invite the top-ranked volunteers to come visit our lab in Berkeley for a special tour.

How to participate:

First, you will go through a web-based training session. You must pass a test to qualify to register and participate. After passing the test and registering, you will be able to login to the virtual microscope. The VM will automatically connect to our server and download focus movies. The VM will work within your web browser, under your control. You will search each field for interstellar dust impacts by focusing up and down with a focus control.

The VM downloads and displays these images, so that you can do just what someone sitting at real microscope would do: focusing up and down in each movie to look for tracks. To use the VM you will need a relatively fast internet connection, and the latest version of just about any web browser. To find out more about the system requirements for the VM visit our Tech FAQ.”

It’s cool to be part of a real scientific project! And you can help your students and patrons to participate, in your library or on their own time.

What else could you do in a library to build on the ideas in this project? Try out a few of these things:

• Pull out all of your books and materials on stars, astronomy, NASA, and anything else relevant to the project.
• Pull up material on teamwork, and talk about how people can be part of a team, and can do good work together taking on different roles.
• Make time for everyone to spend time looking at star maps, online or paper versions. How are stars and constellations named?
• People can choose to be part of the online community, and participate in activities. Look into strategies people could use to be part of parasocial online community groups.
• Gamificiation is part of this community. Write up some strategies this community, or others, use to promote use. What kinds of rewards would be most useful in promoting use?
• Write a story about astronomy or stars, a science fiction story. What kinds of adventures could be out there? Aliens? Space ships? Nothing?
• Draw a picture of some of the stars, or the other things in outer space.