Citizen Scientist Discovers $300m Space Dust

Most people think that science is done behind closed doors with expensive equipment, fiddling around with complicated technology by scientists wearing cheap lab coats. The rest of us merely stand on the outside waiting for some interesting discoveries to be made. Well, although the caricature is partly true there are many experiments where the amount of data is so huge that the research teams have enlisted the help of citizen scientists.

Bruce Hudson, from Ontario in Canada, is just such a citizen scientist and he has discovered what scientists believe is the first piece of interstellar dust that was captured by NASA's Stardust spacecraft. Stardust@home is a website where anybody in the world can help find these particles of stardust, with some 27,000 people having already joined. The prize is that you get to name the particle. Bruce Hudson named the previously boring “particle 30” as Orion. “So far this particle is unique... if we drop it on the floor, it will cost $300m to get another one.” says a nervous Dr Andrew Westphal, from the University of California, Berkeley.

Read the whole article at Xomba.