Jesus H Christ, the Universe is big.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” -Douglas Adams
Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
51–60 of 172 posts
Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#52[dead]
Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The prompt products are alerts, issued within 60 seconds of observation, about objects that have changed brightness or position relative to archived images of that sky position. Transferring, processing, and differencing such large images within 60 seconds (previous methods took hours, on smaller images) is a significant software engineering problem by itself.[64] >This stage of processing will be performed at a cla…
"Let's look for spy satellites / orbiters" was an "application" I wondered about. My second thought about this was: maybe the US (and possibly other countries) already have something like this, but classified?
The US already has a very sophisticated system for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...
Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#54"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#55The amount of data this thing will be putting out every night is insane. For years now the community has been building the infrastructure to be able to efficiently consume it for useful science, but we still have work to do. Anyone interested in the problem of pipelining and distributing 10s of TB of data a night should check out the LSST and related GitHubs.
I've followed this project for over a decade and the amount of data they are moving around is fairly routine, given their budget size and access to computing and networking resources. The total storage (~40-50PB) is pretty large, but moving 10TB around the world isn't special engineering at this point.
Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#56Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#57The amount of data this thing will be putting out every night is insane. For years now the community has been building the infrastructure to be able to efficiently consume it for useful science, but we still have work to do. Anyone interested in the problem of pipelining and distributing 10s of TB of data a night should check out the LSST and related GitHubs.
Is this not the same problem high resolution spy satellites have? Seems like a fair bit of crossover at least?
Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#58Back in January 2010 I went on a blind date with a lady who’s now my wife — an astrophysicist. We talked about this instrument and how Google would shuffle petabytes of raw observations, then distilling them into datasets researchers could actually use (don't know if Google is still involved?). We’ll celebrate 15 years of marriage this January, and I have been following the progress of this telescope since 2007 or so. It's amazing how long it takes for these instruments to come online, but the benefits are significant.
Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#59The amount of data this thing will be putting out every night is insane. For years now the community has been building the infrastructure to be able to efficiently consume it for useful science, but we still have work to do. Anyone interested in the problem of pipelining and distributing 10s of TB of data a night should check out the LSST and related GitHubs.
I've followed this project for over a decade and the amount of data they are moving around is fairly routine, given their budget size and access to computing and networking resources. The total storage (~40-50PB) is pretty large, but moving 10TB around the world isn't special engineering at this point.
It's not about the size of the data in bytes, it's also the amount of changes that need to be detected and alerts that need to be sent out (estimated at millions a night). Keep in mind the downstream consumers of this data are mostly small scientific outfits with extremely limited software engineering budgets.
Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also microlensing events, supernovae, and many other things in our very dynamic universe.
Also new planets! Planet Nine should likely be resolved within months, one way or another. > "Probably within the first year we’re going to see if there’s something there or not,” says Pedro Bernardinelli, an astronomer at the University of Washington." https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/is-there-...
nice