Another example of Google's interest in astronomy, space science and technology:
Original story here.
Google has joined a group of nineteen universities and national labs that are building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
Scheduled to begin operations in 2013, the 8.4-meter LSST will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-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 rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids as small as 100 meters, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. LSST is a public-private partnership.
Google Inc. has joined with nineteen other organizations to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, scheduled to see first light atop Cerro Pachón in Chile in 2013. Image Credit: Michael Mullen Design, LSST Corporation. Click on the image for a high resolution version of the image.
LSST and Google share many of the same goals: organizing massive quantities of data and making it useful. Over 30 thousand gigabytes (30TB) of images will be generated every night during the decade -long LSST sky survey. The massive amount of data from LSST must be managed efficiently and analyzed in real time. Key areas in the Google-LSST collaboration will be: organizing the massive ingestion of information, processing and analyzing the continuous data streams in a 24/7 fault tolerant manner, enabling the new discoveries coming out of the LSST to be made available to the public and researchers in real time, and working with and managing large parallel data systems. In addition to aiding professional scientists and amateur astronomers, properly organized the LSST data will generate a new and dynamic view of the night sky for the public. LSST data will be valuable to curious minds of all ages, and will provide a powerful teaching tool.
In applying for membership, William Coughran, Google VP of Engineering, said "Google's mission is to take the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The data from LSST will be an important part of the world's information, and by being involved in the project we hope to make it easier for that data to become accessible and useful."
"The LSST will be the world's most powerful survey telescope, with vast data management challenges. LSST engineers and scientists have been collaborating with Google on a number of these exciting opportunities. Even though the Universe is very old, exciting things happen every second. The LSST will be able to find these events hundreds of times better than today's other big telescopes. Google will help us organize and present the seemingly overwhelming volumes of data collected by the LSST," said Donald Sweeney, LSST Project Manager.
"Partnering with Google will significantly enhance our ability to convert LSST data to knowledge," said University of California, Davis, Professor and LSST Director J. Anthony Tyson. "LSST will change the way we observe the universe by mapping the visible sky deeply, rapidly, and continuously. It will open entirely new windows on our universe, yielding discoveries in a variety of areas of astronomy and fundamental physics. Innovations in data management will play a central role."
More information about the LSST including current images, graphics, and animation can be found at http://www.lsst.org
In 2003, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Research Corporation, The University of Arizona, and the University of Washington formed the LSST Corporation, a non-profit 501©3 Arizona corporation, with headquarters in Tucson, AZ. Membership has expanded to include Brookhaven National Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Google Inc., Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Johns Hopkins University, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology - Stanford University, Las Cumbres Observatory Inc., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Princeton University, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University of California at Davis, University of California at Irvine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Pennsylvania.
The LSST research and development effort is funded in part by the National Science Foundation under Scientific Program Order No. 9 (AST-0551161) through Cooperative Agreement AST-0132798. Additional funding comes from private donations, in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSSTC Institutional Members.
Full Version: Google joins Large Synoptic Survey Project
It appears that there has been a Google-LSST connection for some years now:
The original story.
The Google Astronomer
01 June 2005
When he wasn’t busy developing the JAVA programming language at Sun Microsystems or managing the work of Google’s army of software engineers, Wayne Rosing liked to build telescopes.
Telescopes have been a hobby for Rosing since he was a teenager, and astronomy was Rosing’s gateway into physics, math and computer programming. Now, recently retired from Google where he was the company's vice president of Engineering, Rosing will turn his attention to a unique telescope project that will provide scientists with a wider, faster, and deeper view of the universe than current telescopes allow.
Throughout his career, Rosing has held management positions at some of the biggest names in the computer industry, including Sun Microsystems, Apple and Google. Despite it all, however, Rosing never outgrew his interest in astronomy. During a break in the mid-1990s, Rosing took a two-year hiatus and traveled to Chile, where he helped build a robotic telescope that mapped the matter and energy filling the space between the stars. Rosing also founded the Las Cumbres Observatory near his home in Santa Barbara, California.
An engineer and manager his entire professional life, Rosing enjoyed the change of pace that being an astronomer and scientist provided. "It’s really fun to change gears, write software, get on machines and assemble parts," Rosing said. "It’s a real pleasure."
In May of this year, Rosing was named the first senior fellow in mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Davis. As part of the position, Rosing will work with Anthony Tyson, a physics professor at UC Davis, on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST will be a ground-based telescope that combines a wide field of view and an extremely sensitive digital camera—capable of producing 3,000 megapixel images—to provide scientists with a new way of looking at the universe. The LSST is expected to be ready for first light by 2012. While Rosing’s exact duties are still being determined, Tyson said Rosing’s background will be very useful for extracting knowledge and understanding from the deluge of information expected to pour in from the telescope each night.
The LSST was initially conceived in 1998 as a way to map asteroids and other space objects that stray too close to earth, but its mission was expanded to search for clues about the nature of dark matter and dark energy, a mysterious substance and force that are believed to permeate the universe but which scientists know very little about.
"The [LSST] will help us understand the development of dark matter over cosmic time and help us pin down the nature of dark energy," Tyson told SPACE.com.
It will do this by scanning the universe for evidence of gravity lensing, a process by which a massive celestial object warps the fabric of space-time so much that light streaming from distant objects are forced to bend around it. As a result, gravitational mirages are produced, whereby distant luminous objects, like stars or even entire galaxies, are distorted or appear to shift their positions. Stranger still, they may be projected multiple times upon the night sky.
Using gravitational lensing, astronomers can examine objects that would normally be hidden from view, obstructed by the object that is acting as the lens. This allows them to peer deeper into the universe—and thus, father back in time—than would otherwise be possible. Furthermore, by working backwards and asking what kind of object might be causing the observed distortion, astronomers can glean information about the lensing bodies themselves, which can include galaxy clusters and dark matter.
"A clump of dark matter will have mass, and if it is a big enough clump, it will have a big mass and will actually bend light from the background, moving it to new places in the sky," Tyson explained.
By measuring the amount of distortion caused by dark matter as a result of gravity lensing, scientists can map its distribution in the universe and tell something about how it developed over the eons.
The LSST is also expected to shed some light on dark energy, the mysterious force believed to be wrenching the universe apart and speeding up its expansion. Information gathered from the LSST will be used to construct a 3D map of the universe, complete with the precise location of billions of galaxies. Measuring the speed at which these galaxies are speeding away from each other over time will give scientists an idea of how much dark energy the universe contains.
The LSST will also be able to detect transient sources of luminosity, brief flashes of light that flare in and out of existence too quickly for most telescopes to pick up clearly. It is this last application of the LSST that Rosing is most excited about.
"I’m personally interested in how we are going to systematically classify all these [transient] phenomenon and figure out what the universe is telling us," Rosing said.
Because the LSST will be capable of covering the entire night sky once every three days, each patch of sky will be revisited numerous times. This will allow scientists to survey the universe on time scales that were previously impossible.
Rosing is thrilled to be working on the project and expects it will keep him remarkably busy. "They should call it refired instead of retired."
The original story.
The Google Astronomer
01 June 2005
When he wasn’t busy developing the JAVA programming language at Sun Microsystems or managing the work of Google’s army of software engineers, Wayne Rosing liked to build telescopes.
Telescopes have been a hobby for Rosing since he was a teenager, and astronomy was Rosing’s gateway into physics, math and computer programming. Now, recently retired from Google where he was the company's vice president of Engineering, Rosing will turn his attention to a unique telescope project that will provide scientists with a wider, faster, and deeper view of the universe than current telescopes allow.
Throughout his career, Rosing has held management positions at some of the biggest names in the computer industry, including Sun Microsystems, Apple and Google. Despite it all, however, Rosing never outgrew his interest in astronomy. During a break in the mid-1990s, Rosing took a two-year hiatus and traveled to Chile, where he helped build a robotic telescope that mapped the matter and energy filling the space between the stars. Rosing also founded the Las Cumbres Observatory near his home in Santa Barbara, California.
An engineer and manager his entire professional life, Rosing enjoyed the change of pace that being an astronomer and scientist provided. "It’s really fun to change gears, write software, get on machines and assemble parts," Rosing said. "It’s a real pleasure."
In May of this year, Rosing was named the first senior fellow in mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Davis. As part of the position, Rosing will work with Anthony Tyson, a physics professor at UC Davis, on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST will be a ground-based telescope that combines a wide field of view and an extremely sensitive digital camera—capable of producing 3,000 megapixel images—to provide scientists with a new way of looking at the universe. The LSST is expected to be ready for first light by 2012. While Rosing’s exact duties are still being determined, Tyson said Rosing’s background will be very useful for extracting knowledge and understanding from the deluge of information expected to pour in from the telescope each night.
The LSST was initially conceived in 1998 as a way to map asteroids and other space objects that stray too close to earth, but its mission was expanded to search for clues about the nature of dark matter and dark energy, a mysterious substance and force that are believed to permeate the universe but which scientists know very little about.
"The [LSST] will help us understand the development of dark matter over cosmic time and help us pin down the nature of dark energy," Tyson told SPACE.com.
It will do this by scanning the universe for evidence of gravity lensing, a process by which a massive celestial object warps the fabric of space-time so much that light streaming from distant objects are forced to bend around it. As a result, gravitational mirages are produced, whereby distant luminous objects, like stars or even entire galaxies, are distorted or appear to shift their positions. Stranger still, they may be projected multiple times upon the night sky.
Using gravitational lensing, astronomers can examine objects that would normally be hidden from view, obstructed by the object that is acting as the lens. This allows them to peer deeper into the universe—and thus, father back in time—than would otherwise be possible. Furthermore, by working backwards and asking what kind of object might be causing the observed distortion, astronomers can glean information about the lensing bodies themselves, which can include galaxy clusters and dark matter.
"A clump of dark matter will have mass, and if it is a big enough clump, it will have a big mass and will actually bend light from the background, moving it to new places in the sky," Tyson explained.
By measuring the amount of distortion caused by dark matter as a result of gravity lensing, scientists can map its distribution in the universe and tell something about how it developed over the eons.
The LSST is also expected to shed some light on dark energy, the mysterious force believed to be wrenching the universe apart and speeding up its expansion. Information gathered from the LSST will be used to construct a 3D map of the universe, complete with the precise location of billions of galaxies. Measuring the speed at which these galaxies are speeding away from each other over time will give scientists an idea of how much dark energy the universe contains.
The LSST will also be able to detect transient sources of luminosity, brief flashes of light that flare in and out of existence too quickly for most telescopes to pick up clearly. It is this last application of the LSST that Rosing is most excited about.
"I’m personally interested in how we are going to systematically classify all these [transient] phenomenon and figure out what the universe is telling us," Rosing said.
Because the LSST will be capable of covering the entire night sky once every three days, each patch of sky will be revisited numerous times. This will allow scientists to survey the universe on time scales that were previously impossible.
Rosing is thrilled to be working on the project and expects it will keep him remarkably busy. "They should call it refired instead of retired."
Amazing story indeed 
This telescope will produce 22 Terabytes of data every night!
http://www.lsst.org/Images/lsst_images.shtml
This telescope will produce 22 Terabytes of data every night!
http://www.lsst.org/Images/lsst_images.shtml
Somebody tell Google that MSL needs money.
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