Berkeley have announced a new project to look for stardust collected from a comet by satellite, which is returning to earth this month.

http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

The initial problems I see are

a) you will need training (over the web)
if you pass you be selected
c) you (not the computer) will have to examine the data.
d) Credits (important to some)

Anyway, if you are interested you can pre-register at the site above.

bjango

I like this one.
Seems so...interstellar...

I pre-registered, although I hope there'll eventually be a boinc client for it. Simply as more would be a part of it and work would be done faster

I bet I'll find more of this stardust thingy than you!

don't get to confident, you may not get picked. and i might not either.

bjango

Come on... can you think of better people to look for this star seeds than us?

Better than us two and the others that comment on this great site. NO CHANCE.

Lets make it a challenge then and get picked first. Then we'll see who'll find the most stardust.

bjango

Arrrr!!!!
Ye hast no chances matey!

i doubt that an app could be made easilly, due to the complex analysis needed, it's easier and more efficient to get a few hundred pairs of eyes looking at actual images than to try and develop some kind of AI app to "look" for the particles
An app would probably be much slower too

[quote]
I bet I'll find more of this stardust thingy than you!

Just make sure one of you post one of those images here, so that we can see what it looks like.

ah, i was thinking in terms of the app doing it all on it's own, but yes, with enough work that should be entirely possible, there are such systems for manufacturing, so that an "error-spotter" person has to check fewer items
as someone is more likely to spot a bad item out of 100 candidates, rather than out of 10,000

but considering the short life-span of the project would it be worth all the effort of developing an app to do that?
i'd imagine it'd be quite complex, but i suppose it's possible

There are two QuoickTime movies on StarDust mission on NASA site:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/highlights/index.html

Quite interesting. I didn't imagine that aerogel was so... thin...