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New Wide-Angle Telescope to Capture Night Sky
NewScientist is reporting that a new telescope located in Chile is aiming to capture images of the entire night sky every three nights. From the article: "The telescope will use a digital camera with 3 billion pixels to image the entire sky across three nights, producing an expected 30 terabytes of data per night. This will allow astronomers to detect objects that quickly change their position, such as near-Earth asteroids, or their brightness, such as supernovae."
Chile doesn't need to have their own supercomputers. The people funding it (RTFA) can ship them in. While Chile is one of the more prosperous South American countries, this is not Chile's project, and is probably only involved because they probably have the right site for the observatory.
Mods, please don't mod this up. Its bullshit. True that Forth was in *1976* was made the official language of the IAU, but no astronomer uses Forth these days, and there's no hint anywhere that the guys who run this telescope are going to be using it either. These days Astronomers are more likely to use Python, Perl, C, C++, Java and other modern languages to write their data analysis tools in.
Actually, most astronomers use FORTRAN there days. Packages like AIPS and MIRIAD are completely written in them.
:-)
The newer stuff like AIPS++ uses C++.
I'm working on one of these next-generation telescopes, it LOFAR, we hope to have it operational in 2008. All software is written in C++, except for some user interfaces in Java.
The telescope in the topic is only a dream at this point, they have nowhere near the funding to start yet. LOFAR on the other hand is already being build. Our software correlator is already running on our IBM BlueGene, making it the 9th fastest computer in the world. Our 144 GBit/s links to the sub-stations are operational, and the first full substation (of 77) will be operational next month.
These guys are talking 30 TByte/day, we're talking a raw datarate of 1.5 Petabyte/day at the end of 2008. This is going to be the largest radio-telescope in the world, at 300km (200 mi.), at least until SKA gets build (if it gets build)
It's a realy cool project
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Particle accelerator experiments seem to regularly result in data from 10 to 100 terabytes. The Stanford Linear Accelerator has a db of over 800 terabytes and I believe it didn't cost too much to set up (not to mention I doubt it's exactly cutting edge anymore if it ever was), so such large data sets are already in use. Given that this data will be mostly black space and much of the rest will not change unexpectadly over time compression will make it a small problem in comparison to the onces I already listed.
first, on the whole political thing:
the competition in astronomy is fierce. there's a fixed amount of money and a pile of good projects. there's a big peer-review process that evaluates possible projects and gives priorities. then the nsf goes round looking for dead wood it can hack away so that there's money for the best projects. no-one is complacent - i work at ctio and everyone there was assuming that they were going to lose their jobs. and because lsst won't really kick in for a few years, we may still be laid off before then (even though we're all working like crazy on related projects). this isn't a bunch of "has beens" making life easy for themselves - it's a vicious, competitive world where only projects that really stand a good chance of changing astronomy make it.
second, the technology choice:
if you are talking about synthetic apertures (like radio telescopes) then no - you cannot link optical telescopes together state-wide. you can control them in parallel, sure, but you cannot combine the data in the same way as radio telescopes. it's way beyond our technical ability. so if there is no synthetic aperture, what's the advantage in spreading them around? especially when world class telescope sites with existing support are very rare. it makes most sense to put one telescope on the top of a mountain in a chilean desert.
and don't think you can re-use any old telescope. the structural engineering of this thing is going to be brutal - to optimize throughput the slews (moving to a new position on the sky) are going to be way faster than anything currently out there. that's one reason the site decision had to be made early - they need to know what they're building this on just to control the vibration levels!
there is a competing project, called pan-stars, which has a group of co-located telescopes. the advantage of that approach is largely political - you can build one cheaply and then look for more funding. but if you do the maths - and this is well understood engineering/optics/statistics, the answer is clear - the lsst solution comes out on top.
oh, and it's not old news either; the press conference anouncing that this was going to chile was held in the room next to my office a few days ago.
http://www.acooke.org