NASA is looking for volunteers to spend about 30,000 hours looking at minuscule particles on a web-based microscope to identify traces of interstellar dust collected by the "Stardust" spacecraft, expected to return to Earth on Sunday, according to Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa). The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Tuesday it would enlist an army of internet volunteers to help in the meticulous search for rare grains of "submicroscopic dust" that was collected along with larger grains of dust from the comet Wild 2 during the probe's seven-year, 4.5 billion kilometre journey. The reward for discoverers will be the privilege of naming the dust grains they find. The programme was announced at the national meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. "Twenty or 30 years ago, we would have hired a small army of microscopists who would be hunched over microscopes focusing up and down ... looking for the tracks of these dust grains," said Andrew Westphal, a University of California at Berkeley scientist who developed the technique to digitally scan the aerogel in which the dust is embedded. --More 00 02 Local Time 21 02 GMT
