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6.7 Meter Telescope To Capture 30 Terabytes Per Night
Lumenary7204 writes "The Register has a story about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project to build a 6.7 meter effective-diameter ground-based telescope that will be used to map some of the faintest objects in the night sky. Jeff Kantor, the LSST Project Data Manager, indicates that the telescope should be in operation by 2016, will generate around 30 terabytes of data per night, and will 'open a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects.' The end result will be a 150 petabyte database containing one of the most detailed surveys of the universe ever undertaken by a ground-based telescope. The telescope's 8.4 meter mirror blank was recently unveiled at the University of Arizona's Mirror Lab in Tucson."
It not being in space might have something to do with the amount of data it would have to transmit and the speed limitations... Besides, you can't replace Hubble, its impossible to exactly replicate that many technical difficulties...
What, like storing the year as two digits, that sort of thing?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
No, removing any data that could prove the possibility of Extraterrestrial life :P
30 Terabytes, consisting mainly of #000000.