As a person, I’m very interested in astronomy and space exploration. As a librarian, I’m interested in open access and for as much scientific research to be free to the public as possible. Imagine my surprise when Peter Suber, one of the nation’s experts on the topic of open access to scholarship and who normally blogs about journals, had this post:
Large new telescope will provide OA data in real time Regarding Bill Gates and Microsoft’s most famous astronaut fund deep space telescope, Networked World, January 4, 2008.
My favorite quote from the article:
“LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it,” Gates told the Associated Press. LSST is designed to be a public facility – the database and resulting catalogs will be made available to the community at large with no proprietary restrictions. A sophisticated data-management system will provide easy access, enabling simple queries from individual users (both professionals and amateurs), as well as computationally intensive scientific investigations that utilize the entire database, Penn State said….
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The query system will have to be very robust as the telescope is supposed to generate 30 Terabytes each and every night! It probably won’t be a problem as the telescope isn’t expected to be online until 2014. By then 30 TB a day might seem manageable. For those not clear on the concept, a terabyte is a 1024 GB. It’s easy to buy 2GB thumb drives and a little over 15,000 of these keychain drives would hold a night’s telescope data.
Looks like I’ve got a lot to look forward to in my retirement.
Filed under: astronomy, opensource | Tagged: computing, storage, telescopes
