Here's a quick round of BOINC news: one new project, one that's back, and one coming back next month.
New Project: Kessler@Home
Kessler@Home is a volunteer computing project that studies the long-term stability of low Earth orbit. In 1978, NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais described how collisions between objects in orbit could create debris faster than the atmosphere removes it. That sets off a self-sustaining cascade, now known as the Kessler syndrome.
Your computer simulates possible futures of the orbital environment, each up to 200 years long. A simulation only stops early once a runaway cascade is unmistakable. The model covers launches, satellite failures, collisions, and the debris clouds they produce. The project runs hundreds of these futures for each of more than 200,000 scenarios, which vary launch traffic, the planned megaconstellations, disposal reliability, debris removal, and the changing atmosphere. From that it can estimate how likely a runaway cascade is and when it would come, not just what the average future looks like.
Project URL: https://kesslerathome.org
SiDock@home Is Back With Work
After being mostly down for the year, SiDock@home is sending out work again. If you had it parked, now's a good time to check your hosts and set it back to allow new tasks.
Project URL: https://www.sidock.si/sidock/
Amicable Numbers Returns December 1st
The Amicable Numbers project announced on November 6th, 2026 that its search for all amicable numbers up to 1022 will start on December 1st, 2026. The restart comes from a newly discovered exhaustive search algorithm that is much faster than the old one. Stay tuned!
Project URL: https://sech.me/boinc/Amicable/
As always, all of these are tracked here on Free-DC. Happy crunching!
— Skillz