Slashdot Mirror
World's Largest Digital Camera Project Passes Critical Milestone
An anonymous reader writes in with a link about the progress of one of the coolest astronomy projects around. "A 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera designed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is now one step closer to reality. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope camera, which will capture the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed, has received 'Critical Decision 1' approval by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to move into the next stage of the project. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics."
that DOE is doing this and not NASA.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I hate when articles can't use standard units. Are petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes not really usable yet?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I would think that it would also help track down just about everything in the Solar system, when using successive pictures of the same portion of the sky in a "Blinker" box or whatever they use in place of that now. Dark matter is all fine and dandy, but the location and trajectory of Asteroids and comets are of a different degree of importance!