Google, astronomers to create “YouTube of Astronomy”
Posted by Jacque on January 5th, 2007
Google is partnering with astronomers at several universities to create the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), planned to start operation in 2013 on a Chilean mountaintop. The telescope will take moving digital images of the entire visible sky. The Seattle P-I has the details.
“This will provide an incredibly rich view of the universe,” said University of Washington (UW) astronomer Craig Hogan. Once completed, he added, the movies will be publicly accessible for anyone to watch and study.
The enormous amount of data — more than 30,000 gigabytes worth of images each evening – will have to be analyzed constantly as it accumulates over time, and then efficiently managed to make it publicly accessible. That’s where Google’s expertise comes in.
“Google’s mission is to take the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said William Coughran, vice president of engineering for Google, in a news release announcing the firm’s new partnership with the LSST.
The new telescope could help answer questions such as when an asteroid is headed toward Earth. Because the LSST collects images of moving objects, it could be useful for identifying much earlier any asteroid on a collision course with our planet. “Right now, we don’t really have any way of finding them early enough, before it’s obvious,” said Suzanne Hawley, chairwoman of the UW astronomy department.
The idea that in the future we might have as the world’s largest database a moving picture of the universe iis an exciting one.
