NASA Releases Atlas Of Entire Sky
J. Nicholas Hoover (InformationWeek) writes:
NASA this week released to the Web an atlas and catalog of 18,000 images consisting of more than 563 million stars, galaxies, asteroids, planets, and other objects in the sky–many of which have never been seen or identified before–along with data on all of those objects.
The space agency’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, which was a collaboration of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California Los Angeles, collected the data over the past two years, capturing more than 2.7 million images and processing more than 15 TB of astronomical data along the way. In order to make the data easier to use, NASA condensed the 2.7 million digital images down to 18,000 that cover the entire sky.
The WISE mission, which mapped the entire sky, uncovered a number of never-before-seen objects in the night sky, including an entirely new class of stars and the first “Trojan” asteroid that shares the Earth’s orbital path. The study also determined that there were far fewer mid-sized asteroids near Earth than had been previously thought. Even before the mass release of data to the Web, there have already been at least 100 papers published detailing the more limited results that NASA had already released.
Hoover also says that NASA has developed tutorials to assist developers in working with the data and that the entire database will be available in the not too distant future.
When I see releases like this one, I am reminded of Jim Gray (MS). Jim was reported to like astronomy data sets because they are big and free. See what you think about this one.