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Bill Gates and Microsoft Fund Telescope

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the he's-still-a-nerd-people dept.

coondoggie writes "Bill Gates and the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences this week donated $30 million to an ambitious telescope that researchers say will be able to survey the entire sky every three nights — something never done before. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project got $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. Expected to see its "first light" in 2014, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3 billion-pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move. With the telescope scientists will be able to quickly find Earth-threatening asteroids and exploding stars called supernovas and will be able to map out 100 billion galaxies, according to researchers."

13 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. ah! by Coraon · · Score: 4, Funny

    but does it run Linux?

    --
    -Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
    1. Re:ah! by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Most probably not.

      In addition to receiving funding from Bill Gates and Microsoft, another sponsor was the Charles Simonyi Foundation. Charles Simonyi, for those who are not aware, was responsible for Microsoft Office as head of Microsoft's Applications division for many years. Much of the early version of Microsoft Word for MS-DOS and Multiplan were coded by Simonyi. He is the originator of the so-called 'Hungarian' notion for identifiers prevalent among M$ developers, where an identifier's type is embedded in the name, so you get variables like sName or nCount.

      --
      My blog
    2. Re:ah! by chrisd · · Score: 3, Informative
      Please note that the LSST -isn't- about os politics, but about near earth object detection, and the telescope is going to create a crapton of data that needs storing and processing but last I talked with the engineering team, they were planning on running Linux across the -many- machines they need to process the data.

      Chris DiBona

      --
      Co-Editor, Open Sources
      Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
  2. Isn't this what my tax money is supposed to fund? by schwit1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As opposed to the bridge to nowhere or the Woodstock memorial.

  3. I bet... by aurb · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...they are going to use it to search for potential markets for Microsofts` products...

  4. Re:Isn't this what my tax money is supposed to fun by Amiga+Trombone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It might be arguable that it should, but the reality is that it never will.

    One more argument for keeping money in the pocket of the people who earn it, rather than the government's....

  5. someone has to say it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Blue Sky Of Death

  6. They're going to use it to watch . . . by Rolgar · · Score: 3, Funny

    The winner of the Google Lander program land on the moon.

  7. It looks like you're trying... by gimpeh · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...to scan the sky!

    Do you want to
    • create a document template?
    • send an email to a friend?
    • send the invasion fleet to a new planet?

    --
    Script kiddies ate my sig.
  8. Re:Isn't this what my tax money is supposed to fun by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The founders of the U.S. had a problem with taxation without representation, not taxation in general. As long as elected representatives have overseen taxation and government expenditure, all is running as intended. This Slashdot mentality of "This money is mine, and the government is just stealing it!" is just elitist dismissal of democracy, because you think you know better how money should be spent than your community. Plus, it's crazy to claim that the money is yours alone when, hey, there wouldn't be coinage without the government and they can determine what to do with it. If you don't like it, start bartering.

  9. Bill Gates and Simonyi foundation... by $random_var · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...not Bill Gates and Microsoft. Anybody making that misattribution clearly didn't even read the headline of the actual article, let alone the chunk of text quoted in the summary.

  10. Is that how much it costs? by johannesg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Only $30 million to look for planet-destroying rocks from outer space? Is that really all it takes to saveguard our species and world from such threats? If so, why aren't there half a dozen of these things already scanning the heavens every second of the day?

    Gee, *humans*...

  11. Re:there is no dark matter .. by volsung · · Score: 4, Informative

    Galactic rotation curves are only one of the pieces of evidence of dark matter. There is also a lot of evidence due to weak lensing that there are large invisible mass distributions. The Bullet Cluster is an especially impressive observation of two clusters colliding. The shockwave from the baryonic gases smacking into each other has separated the hydrogen from the dark matter, as seen when you overlay the xray map and the mass distribution reconstructed with weak lensing. Modified theories of gravity can most easily explain discrepancies when the visible matter and apparent invisible matter are concentric (such as in rotation curves). Then you just need to tweak the radial force strength at large distance. But in a system like the bullet cluster, the visible and dark matter have been separated, and that's a lot harder to explain with modified gravity. (Not that people aren't trying, of course...)

    Astronomers fought long and hard against dark matter, but grudgingly accepted it after it became more and more difficult to explain galactic rotation curves, weak lensing, the large scale structure of galactic clusters, and the power spectrum of variations in the cosmic microwave background without it. It all fits together much better when you introduce a very weakly interacting source of mass into the soup that makes up the universe. (Weakly interacting enough to become a nearly collisionless fluid early on during the expansion of the universe.) The smoking gun will be the detection of dark matter in a controlled lab setting. Those searches are just now beginning to ramp up.