Microsoft/Google Team to Put Biggest Digital Camera into Orbit for Internet Use!

[dav3]

Jan. 7, 2008 -- A former Microsoft lead developer who paid $25 million to travel in space is teaming up with his old boss Bill Gates to help develop an innovative telescope that will make movies of the night sky for posting on the Internet.

Charles Simonyi, who last year became the fifth tourist to visit the International Space Station, will donate $20 million to a project known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, which is scheduled to begin operating in 2014 from a mountaintop in northern Chile. Gates is contributing $10 million.

The money will be used for construction of the telescope's three mirrors. Upon completion, the observatory is expected to continuously scan the night skies so its 3-billion pixel camera -- the largest digital camera ever built -- can take what will amount to moving pictures.

Google has signed up to manage the mammoth amounts of data to come from LSST. About 30 terabytes -- a terabyte equals about 1,000 gigabytes -- are expected every night. The LSST data will be distributed at no charge.

"LSST is truly an Internet telescope which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it ...the 8.4 meter LSST telescope and the three gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity," Gates said in a statement.

Unlike most telescopes which hone in on specific targets for study, the LSST will cast a wide net on the sky, imaging sections roughly the size of nine full moons every 15 seconds.

"The pictures will be taken rapidly enough so you can piece them together like a flip book," said Suzanne Jacoby, LSST manager for education and public outreach. "Each spot on the sky will have thousands of pages in its flip book and it easily allows you to see anything that has changed."

The data is expected to be useful for studying a wide range of cosmological phenomena such as dark energy and dark matter, galaxy formation and small bodies in the solar system.

In addition to Simonyi and Gates' gifts, the project has won $14.2 million in federal design and development grants and raised about $25 million in private donations. LSST's total cost is estimated at $400 million.

LSST was the second telescope in less than a month to snare a mega-donor. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in December pledged $200 million for the Thirty Meter Telescope being designed by a partnership of California universities.

LSST is spearheaded by the University of Arizona, Research Corp., the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the University of Washington.

Other partners include: Brookhaven National Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Johns Hopkins University,Stanford University, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Princeton University, Purdue University, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University of California at Davis, University of California at Irvine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/0...19-506-ak-0008

That would be cool as hell! Hopefully they don't make it suck somehow.

[OzMan]

ground based not in orbit but yeah very cool indeed, throw away your telescope and fire up your browser!

[dav3]

Originally Posted by OzMan

ground based not in orbit but yeah very cool indeed, throw away your telescope and fire up your browser!

haha, bloops! I just skimmed it and had wishful thinking I guess. Still pretty awesome though!

[rowan]

I wonder how they're capturing and distributing those 30 terabytes of data. If my calcs are right, to transfer that in real time they'd need about 3Gbit/sec of sustained bw.

[tony286]

man that will be very cool.