The stardust spacecraft spent seven years collecting outer-space dust in large sheets of aerogel. Now it's back on Earth and researchers have enlisted the help of internet users to find microscopic specks of dust in the aerogel. They taken 1.6 million images of the gel with a scanning microscope and are distributing these to
volunteers. Already some people have found signs of life. Unfortunately
it's not extraterrestrial life:
On its first day, the website shut down due to heavy traffic. And a few hours after re-opening, it had a stranger problem. In among the speckled grey aerogel pictures appeared photos of weddings, bike riders, sunbathers and more. As the Stardust team put it: "Random images of unknown origin appear in the focus movies. We do not yet understand their origin, but they are not images of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector." Amused volunteers speculated about hackers, mischievous team members or problems with the server.
And things get worse, because a lot of the internet volunteers are cheating:
The system randomly checks volunteers' efforts by occasionally throwing in a 'test' photo, where the Stardust team already knows there is or isn't a sign of a dust particle. The volunteer's performance on these gives them a skill rating, which determines how seriously a claim to find a real dust particle is taken. As was quickly documented on the website's forums, however, it is easy to cheat by simply looking carefully at the URL associated with each picture in order to distinguish 'test' pictures from the real ones that have yet to be analysed. Some users have cracked the trick admirably, boosting their skill ratings astronomically in a short period of time.
Comments
Some users have WAY too much time on their hands.
But I guess you could say the same thing about people who spend their time reading about people who ...
Particle traveling a breakneck speeds embed themselves in areogel leaving a clear tell-tale track in a sensor that is then withdrawn back into the capsule for the return trip. Scientists, being on average smarter than posters on hoax boards, designed it this way precisely to sequester true space particles from your every day dust.
The quick answer, though, is that the dust tracks are easy for a trained human to spot, but very difficult for a computer to spot. Volunteers mark possible tracks for the real scientists to look at and verify. The amount of interstellar dust vs. acreage is the equivalent of 45 ants on a football field, found by searching squares 5" on a side. Not an easy task.