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April 12, 2015

US, Chile to ‘officially’ kick off LSST construction

Filed under: Astroinformatics,BigData — Patrick Durusau @ 5:01 pm

US, Chile to ‘officially’ kick off LSST construction

From the post:

From distant exploding supernovae and nearby asteroids to the mysteries of dark matter, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) promises to survey the night skies and provide data to solve the universe’s biggest mysteries. On April 14, news media are invited to join the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and other public-private partners as they gather outside La Serena, Chile, to “officially” launch LSST’s construction in a traditional Chilean stone-laying ceremony.

LSST is an 8.4-meter, wide-field survey telescope that will image the entire visible sky a few times a week for 10 years. It is located in Cerro Pachón, a mountain peak in northern Chile, chosen for its clear air, low levels of light pollution and dry climate. Using a 3-billion pixel camera–the largest digital camera in the world–and a unique three-mirror construction, it will allow scientists to see a vast swath of sky, previously impervious to study.

The compact construction of LSST will enable rapid movement, allowing the camera to observe fleeting, rare astronomical events. It will detect and catalogue billions of objects in the universe, monitoring them over time and will provide this data–more than 30 terabytes each night–to astronomers, astrophysicists and the interested public around the world. Additionally, the digital camera will shed light on dark energy, which scientists have determined is accelerating the universe’s expansion. It will probe further into the mystery of dark energy, creating a unique dataset of billions of galaxies.

It’s not coming online tomorrow, first light in 2019 and full operation in 2022, but its not too early to start thinking about how to process such a flood of data. Astronomers have been working on those issues for some time so if you are looking for new ways to think about processing data, don’t forget to check with the astronomy department.

Even by today’s standards, thirty (30) terabytes of data a night is a lot of data.

Enjoy!

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