Gates Looks to 2014 Night Sky
Gates Looks to 2014 Night Sky
January 8, 2008: Making his final appearance at the World’s largest technology show is not the only thing Bill Gates is up to this week – the Microsoft Chairman has also donated US$10 million to the a massive telescopic project aiming to build a three-billion pixel digital camera.
Gates has made the cash commitment to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST,) a massive digital camera designed to capture, over three days, the entire available night sky.
Measuring 8.4 metres once constructed, the LSST will survey the entire available sky in multiple colours every week capturing Dark Matter, Dark Energy and potentially billions of galaxies in the process.
The donation from Gates meets a further US$20 million given by the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and will assist with construction of the 3200 megapixel camera with it’s three mirrors, refractive lenses and 10 square degree field-of-view. Storage wise, the project will generate a massive 30 terabytes of data a night, into a total databases of 150 petabytes.
Aiming to capture the ‘first night’ in 2014, five years of construction is now required for the three mirrors, with the first stages of production now beginning at the University of Arizona.
Directors on the project claim once constructed, the telescope will change the way the universe is research, with no proprietary restrictions on the data collected.
Donald Sweeney, project manager of LSST said the donation keeps the project on schedule, “enabling the early fabrication of LSST’s large optics and other long-lead components of the LSST system.”
The LSST expects to be able to detect dangerous near-Earth asteroids, distant Kuiper Belt Objects and exploding supernovae. By making its data readily available, scientists from various fields should be able to study its deep exposures covering every part of the sky over 20,000 square degrees to answer some of the more mysterious questions of our time.
“Today, by building a special telescope-computer complex, we can study this dynamism in unprecedented detail,” says Simonyi. “LSST will produce a data base suitable for answering a wide range of pressing questions: What Is dark energy? What is dark matter? How did the Milky Way form? What are the properties of small bodies in the solar system? Are there potentially hazardous asteroids that may impact the earth causing significant damage?”
Describing the project as a shared resource for humanity, Gates described the LSST mission as, “imaginative in its technology and approach as it is with its science mission. LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone who wants to explore it.”
Meanwhile back at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Gates marked his final appearance at the show by urging his audience to prepare for a life integrated with technology as, “everything will connect up.”
With that said, Gates did not offer much by way of new Microsoft gadgets to the crowd. But he did spruce up the presentation with a guest appearance from rock guitarist Slash.