Google Joins Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project

It used to be that astronomy in general and telescopes in particular were smoke and mirrors to me. Eventually, I figured out that they were just mirrors. And then somewhere along the way (circa, the Keck Telescope), telescopes became computers and mirrors.

The same thought must have occurred to Google, although folks there are a lot smarter than me so it all made sense to them a lot sooner. The end result is that Google recently joined with 19 other organizations to build the 8.4-meter Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), scheduled to see first light atop Cerro Pachón in Chile in 2013.

Google's role will be to organize the massive quantities of data and make that data useful. The decade-long LSST sky survey will generate more than 30,000 gigabytes (30 terabytes) of image data every night. Google manage large parallel data streams, and process and analyze data non-stop so that discoveries become available in real time.

"The LSST will be the world's most powerful survey telescope, with vast data management challenges," Donald Sweeney, LSST project manager, said. "LSST engineers and scientists have been collaborating with Google on number of these exciting opportunities. Even though the universe is very old, exciting things happen every second. The LSST will be able to find these events hundreds of times better than today's other big telescopes. Google will help us organize and present the seemingly overwhelming volumes of data collected by the LSST."

No matter how big or how small, telescopes and astronomy is always fascinating. That's one reason we've covered them off and on over the years. For instance, there's:

• David Cox's article XML for Instrument Control and Monitoring which examines the Instrument Markup Language, an XML dialect designed to aid in the exchange of data and commands with remote instruments.
• Then there's Don Parrish's article on Image Processing and Visual Basic which focused (no pun intended) on improving I/O and enhancing image quality.
• Thomas Schneider's Astronomical Adaptive Optics which explains how astronomical adaptive optics is a technique for the real-time removal of atmospheric distortion.
• And Lars Frid-Nielsen and Alex Lane's article Celestial Programming with Turbo Pascal in which he uses Turbo Pascal and a CCD camera to brings astrophotography to the PC.

Even in a backhanded sort of way, the relationship between computers and telescopes is taken for granted, as evident by the quote attributed to Edsger Dykstra in which he supposedly said "Computer science is no more related to the computer than astronomy is related to the telescope--the point being that the computer is just a tool to get to this larger science." I'll buy that.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:58 PM  Permalink