Virtual Astronomy

DarkKnightRadick writes: "In this day and age, data sharing, data mining and distributed computing are words most of us know well enough, but until recently, those phrases were connected with such projects as DNET, and more recently with SETI@Home. Now we should all welcome the newcomer, Virtual Astronomy. With the framework being developed by three different groups (one in the UK, one in the US, and one in Australia), one would expect this to be a very competitive field, but alas, this is not the case. The three groups are working together so that they can have it all up in running the in the projected 15 years that it will take to put all this data into an electronic format."

Comments

That's been the trend in recent years

[Walter Bell]

As a NASA employee, I have seen a pronounced shift in the focus of the organization, from data collection to data distillation and mining. As it turns out, we have tens of years of work ahead of us in processing the data that we collected from space in the 1980s and 1990s alone. In fact, we have not yet developed software to mine the information out of this data that we need - the bottleneck is 95% manpower and 5% CPU cycles. And that is in spite of the budget shifting substantially toward processing and away from missions (which are expensive, misunderstood, and often goofed up).

I fully expect that by 2010 or so, we probably will not be doing launches more than once every few years. Indeed, it is rumored that the recent space shuttle launch was intended only to intimidate third-world nations in the Middle East and make them realize our superior technology - not for any scientific purpose. I do not believe that that launch would have taken place in the absence of the 9/11 events. When I checked the calendar several months ago, it did not show any major launches until late 2002.

~wally