Think you have data storage issues?
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University physicists and computer scientists are part of a national project to create the most powerful telescope ever constructed. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will capture a 10-square-degree field of view - 3,100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's - and will include the largest digital camera ever constructed with 3,200-megapixels [that's over 3 Gigapixels!].
On Jan. 3, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope partnership announced a $20 million gift from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. It is estimated that $389 million will be needed for the telescope's construction.
"In just its first week of operation, LSST will survey a volume of the universe larger than all previous telescopes combined," said Shipsey, who also is a member of the project's camera construction team. "Over 10 years it will continuously search the universe for change and evolution, making an unprecedented 3-D movie of the universe - the greatest movie ever. the telescope will produce 30 terabytes of data per night that dedicated data facilities will process in real time. "LSST will catalog 10 billion galaxies and 10 billion stars, creating 60 petabytes of astronomical image data, which is equivalent to 100 million CDs, and a 30-petabyte database," he said. "Analyzing this data in real time and making it available to the public is an enormous computing challenge."
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is designed to be a public facility. The database and resulting catalogs will be made available to the community at large with no proprietary restrictions. A sophisticated data-management system will provide easy access to enable simple queries from individual professional and amateur users, as well as computationally intensive scientific investigations that utilize the entire database. Read full article.
Thanks to Tom Templin for the heads up on this.
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