I bet if you say the words "Hubble Telescope" to most people, they'll respond with something along the lines of "Isn't that the orbital telescope that doesn't work because NASA didn't check the mirrors?"
Haven't heard anyone talk about Hubble like that for years. What I hear people say nowadays is how cool the images are and how inspired they are by the discoveries. The mirror flaw seems to be ancient history for most people: a stupid mistake, but correctable, therefore forgivable. Contrast that with fraud, which is a deliberate kick in the teeth of public trust.
The press could be more positive in its science coverage, but imagine how a journalist would feel, faced with either explaining Ununoctium and organic semiconductors to Mr. & Mrs. Doe, or reporting on a good old-fashioned scandal. Which would resonate better in a climate recently accustomed to stories about corporate misconduct?
We- STScI, not NASA- are currently migrating the Archive from 12-inch optical media (6GB/platter) to 5.25-inch magneto-optical media (5.2GB/platter, but looking to upgrade to 9.1 next year). In FY02 we want to find a good way of caching the data for distribution on magdisk, to cut down on our reliance on jukeboxes. We're required to keep a permanent version, though, so we'll still write MOs.
Also, we don't actually store 6TB. For the currently operating instruments (WFPC2 & STIS, but not FOC, which doesn't get used much any more), we don't store the calibrated data; we calibrate it on the fly when it's retrieved. We're just now getting ready to take that back a step: we won't even store the uncalibrated data, just the very raw data from the telescope, before it's broken out into FITS files. This will then be turned into uncalibrated data, calibrated, and the result sent to the user (On-the-fly Reproecssing, OTFR). With OTFR, I think we'll actually be storing somewhere between 1 and 2 TB, including the engineering data. OTFR will also apply to future instruments, like ACS and NICMOS (when the latter gets turned back on).
Tim Kimball//
Archive Systems Analyst II//
Space Telescope Science Institute
'Data mining' approaches, sometimes known as 'gather tons of data and sift through it with statistics' are not science. They don't observe fundamental rules of how the Scientific Method works.
So when Edwin Hubble plotted redshift vs distance of a bunch of galaxies and discovered that the universe is expanding, he wasn't doing science?
-- tdk
In effect, isn't this saying "we haven't found anything useful in all these terrabytes, want a copy?"
Not really. Most data centers don't do much analysis on the data, they just provide it to astronomers who do. The wider the data can be cast, the more science can be squeezed out of it.
-- tdk
Check out the National Virtual Observatory (really should be International VO) . This is not a M$ project; it's a new effort among astronomical data centers to do a lot of what you're asking about.
-- tdk
Slashdot Mirror
1) Big Bang
2) ???
3) 13.7 billion years old, flat, 4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy!!!
Raley's in California was playing around with this in the 80s as well.
The press could be more positive in its science coverage, but imagine how a journalist would feel, faced with either explaining Ununoctium and organic semiconductors to Mr. & Mrs. Doe, or reporting on a good old-fashioned scandal. Which would resonate better in a climate recently accustomed to stories about corporate misconduct?
The gov't is going to spend tax money making Microsoft secure? after declaring them a monopoly?
Just for fun, here are the gory details (see page 3).
We- STScI, not NASA- are currently migrating the Archive from 12-inch optical media (6GB/platter) to 5.25-inch magneto-optical media (5.2GB/platter, but looking to upgrade to 9.1 next year). In FY02 we want to find a good way of caching the data for distribution on magdisk, to cut down on our reliance on jukeboxes. We're required to keep a permanent version, though, so we'll still write MOs.
Also, we don't actually store 6TB. For the currently operating instruments (WFPC2 & STIS, but not FOC, which doesn't get used much any more), we don't store the calibrated data; we calibrate it on the fly when it's retrieved. We're just now getting ready to take that back a step: we won't even store the uncalibrated data, just the very raw data from the telescope, before it's broken out into FITS files. This will then be turned into uncalibrated data, calibrated, and the result sent to the user (On-the-fly Reproecssing, OTFR). With OTFR, I think we'll actually be storing somewhere between 1 and 2 TB, including the engineering data. OTFR will also apply to future instruments, like ACS and NICMOS (when the latter gets turned back on).
Tim Kimball //
Archive Systems Analyst II //
Space Telescope Science Institute
So when Edwin Hubble plotted redshift vs distance of a bunch of galaxies and discovered that the universe is expanding, he wasn't doing science?
-- tdk
Not really. Most data centers don't do much analysis on the data, they just provide it to astronomers who do. The wider the data can be cast, the more science can be squeezed out of it.
-- tdk
Check out the National Virtual Observatory (really should be International VO) . This is not a M$ project; it's a new effort among astronomical data centers to do a lot of what you're asking about.
-- tdk