14 DAY TRIAL // By 2014, the world's first Internet telescope will be constructed high up in the Chilean Andes. The instrument will pour terabytes of data directly into the hands of individual users, with no restrictions on the data being supplied.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be constructed in the Atacama Desert, atop Cerro Pachon, and one of its neighbors will be the Gemini South Telescope. The new facility will be located at an altitude of about 2,700 meters (8,900 feet).
The construction effort is partially funded by a grant made available by Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Charles Simyoni. The latter is the developer of the Word and Excel office suites.
They provided $30 million for the LSST, which will be a visible-light observatory. It will be able to image the entire visible sky once per week, and will use a 3.2-gigapixel camera to conduct its investigations, Daily Galaxy reports.
The overall design of the new observatory will incorporate three large mirrors and three refractive lenses inside the camera. This will make it an 8.4-meter-aperture telescope, and it will feed light into the largest digital camera in the world.
“LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it,” said Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
“The 8.4-metre LSST telescope and the 3-gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity – the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the Universe,” he went on to say.
Primarily, the observatory will be involved in conducting investigations on the influences of dark matter and dark energy on the Cosmos. At the same time, it will provide quasi-video capabilities for events such as supernova explosions and passing near-Earth objects (NEO).
“What a shock it was when Galileo saw in his telescope the phases of Venus, or the moons of Jupiter, the first hints of a dynamic Universe. Today, by building a special telescope-computer complex, we can study this dynamism in unprecedented detail,” Simonyi said.
“LSST will produce a database suitable for answering the 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?” he added.
According to the telescope's specifications, the datasets and catalogs it will produce will go directly online, and will become available to anyone interested in them, without any restrictions.
Access to the data will be made possible by a complex, yet simple management system that will assist users in finding the most relevant information available on a given topic.