Stardust Interstellar Preliminary Examination I: Identification of tracks in aerogel

Abstract Here, we report the identification of 69 tracks in approximately 250 cm 2 of aerogel collectors of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector. We identified these tracks through Stardust@home, a distributed internet‐based virtual microscope and search engine, in which > 30,000 amateur scientists collectively performed >9 × 10 7 searches on approximately 10 6 fields of view. Using calibration images, we measured individual detection …