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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."
I wonder how much processing power will be needed to process such a huge amount of data inorder to extract something meaningful out of this data.
Does Chile have some state of art suprcomputers to achieve this or are they going to send the data to some other country for analysis.
And if they decide to transfer data to some other country how are they going to achieve that.. is data transfer on Internet feasible for 30 TB per night of data ?
The ability to scan the entire sky in high resolution in one go WILL be a benefit to every other telescope on earth.
As soon as this thing detects anything strange, the other specific scopes can be aimed in that direction.
Without this, its blind luck whether an event will be witnessed.
liqbase
What's another $300mil? Ugh.
A little over a day in Iraq. As a taxpayer, I would rather fund the telescope.
What?