Slashdot Log In
Bill Gates and Microsoft Fund Telescope
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sat Jan 05, 2008 10:18 AM
from the he's-still-a-nerd-people dept.
from the he's-still-a-nerd-people dept.
coondoggie writes "Bill Gates and the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences this week donated $30 million to an ambitious telescope that researchers say will be able to survey the entire sky every three nights — something never done before.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project got $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. Expected to see its "first light" in 2014, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3 billion-pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move. With the telescope scientists will be able to quickly find Earth-threatening asteroids and exploding stars called supernovas and will be able to map out 100 billion galaxies, according to researchers."
Related Stories
[+]
"Perfect" Mirrors Cast For LSST 114 comments
eldavojohn writes "The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (which was partially funded by Gates & Co.) announced a world record casting for its single-piece primary and tertiary mirror blanks, cast at the University of Arizona. From the announcement: 'The Mirror Lab team opened the furnace for a close-up look at the cooled 51,900-pound mirror blank, which consists of an outer 27.5-foot diameter (8.4-meter) primary mirror and an inner 16.5-foot (5-meter) third mirror cast in one mold. It is the first time a combined primary and tertiary mirror has been produced on such a large scale.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
ah! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:ah! (Score:5, Interesting)
In addition to receiving funding from Bill Gates and Microsoft, another sponsor was the Charles Simonyi Foundation. Charles Simonyi [wikipedia.org], for those who are not aware, was responsible for Microsoft Office as head of Microsoft's Applications division for many years. Much of the early version of Microsoft Word for MS-DOS and Multiplan were coded by Simonyi. He is the originator of the so-called 'Hungarian' notion for identifiers prevalent among M$ developers, where an identifier's type is embedded in the name, so you get variables like sName or nCount.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html [joelonsoftware.com]
sName and nCount is a bit of a perversion on that theme, given that a good IDE will show you the type if you want it and
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
According to http://www.lsst.org/About/Tour/software.shtml [lsst.org]
"Current projects show that approximately 5000 mathematical operations are required per pixel of the image to process and classify survey data. Scaling this to the size of the LSST data stream shows that approximately a thousand of today's high-end processors will be required a feasible proposition. Advances in processor power over the next five years will reduce this number to a few hundred, by which time the req
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, it probably will.
All modern control systems for research telescopes and instruments involve a supervisory layer and that is often run on a Unix or Unix-like system. LSST also has to do an unprecedented amount of soft-real-time processing on the data stream (see their tour page [lsst.org], and this kind of astronomical software typically runs on Linux and/or Unix.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ah! (Score:4, Informative)
Chris DiBona
Parent
Isn't this what my tax money is supposed to fund? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't this what my tax money is supposed to fun (Score:5, Insightful)
One more argument for keeping money in the pocket of the people who earn it, rather than the government's....
Parent
Re:Isn't this what my tax money is supposed to fun (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your mentality is nothing more than you can't do it yourself, you have to have the government. Just another way to destroy individualism.
Moderate taxation isn't a problem, heavy taxation to support social programs is.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Insightful?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
You might want to try reading the original Constitution, prior to the 16th Amendment. Y
Re: (Score:2)
You say that like it matters - Do you really believe "wealth" doesn't exist without the underlying pyramid-scheme of fiat currencies?
Perhaps more relevantly - The US Treasury just last month cracked down on a popular form of exactly what you claim we wouldn't have without the government. Doesn't it strike you as strange that they would need to ha
Re:Isn't this what my tax money is supposed to fun (Score:2)
Religion and Science are not incompatible (Score:3, Insightful)
Bridges and memorials don't pose a challenge to religious dogma.
You seem philosophically akin to the ignorant bible thumper who takes the mistranslated English version of the bible literally in every way, you seem to merely be the mirror image that thinks science means anti-religion. The truth is that science and religion are compatible. The Vatican operates a telescope and funds research:
Dark Matter and Energy in the Cosmos
The Accelerat
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I bet... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It'd scan the sky faster... (Score:2, Funny)
someone has to say it... (Score:4, Funny)
but if it's a VR simulation... (Score:2, Funny)
They're going to use it to watch . . . (Score:4, Funny)
The entire sky in three days? (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
It looks like you're trying... (Score:5, Funny)
Do you want to
there is no dark matter .. (Score:2)
In my opinion this will go the way of the aether [wikipedia.org] and be totally discredited in time. The aether being denser than Iron and being able to propagate light
The basic evidence for 'dark matter' is that galaxies are rotating to fast and maintaining there shape differently than gravitational allows for. They should fly apart or never been formed. Rather then change the current theory, scientists went out and invented 'dark matter'.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So care to explain why there appears to be an expanding universe? Dark matter is a stop gap, but unless you provide a better reason, its all we got. I think that was the point of projects like this to either prove or disprove 'dark matt
Re: (Score:2)
Re:there is no dark matter .. (Score:5, Informative)
Galactic rotation curves are only one of the pieces of evidence of dark matter. There is also a lot of evidence due to weak lensing that there are large invisible mass distributions. The Bullet Cluster is an especially impressive observation of two clusters colliding. The shockwave from the baryonic gases smacking into each other has separated the hydrogen from the dark matter, as seen when you overlay the xray map and the mass distribution reconstructed with weak lensing. Modified theories of gravity can most easily explain discrepancies when the visible matter and apparent invisible matter are concentric (such as in rotation curves). Then you just need to tweak the radial force strength at large distance. But in a system like the bullet cluster, the visible and dark matter have been separated, and that's a lot harder to explain with modified gravity. (Not that people aren't trying, of course...)
Astronomers fought long and hard against dark matter, but grudgingly accepted it after it became more and more difficult to explain galactic rotation curves, weak lensing, the large scale structure of galactic clusters, and the power spectrum of variations in the cosmic microwave background without it. It all fits together much better when you introduce a very weakly interacting source of mass into the soup that makes up the universe. (Weakly interacting enough to become a nearly collisionless fluid early on during the expansion of the universe.) The smoking gun will be the detection of dark matter in a controlled lab setting. Those searches are just now beginning to ramp up.
Parent
With all apologies to Roger Waters... (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe it will discover the mysteries of (Score:2, Funny)
Bill Gates and Simonyi foundation... (Score:3, Informative)
3 billion pixels??? (Score:2)
Is that how much it costs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee, *humans*...
Re: (Score:2)
If theres a viable "... Then blows the offending chunk of matter into its constituent atoms" support system, then yeah crank em out.
Re: (Score:2)
Some people like to watch the doctor do the injection, other people like to close their eyes. Both methods still result in the injection happening...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Link to a previous discussion (Score:2)
Go to the source (Score:2)
Here are links to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) home page [lsst.org] and its layout and construction [lsst.org].
My God! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If we stopped investing millions into projects like these, your cell phone in 2014 would look exactly the same as it does today.