"Perfect" Mirrors Cast For LSST 114
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.'"
Forget the mirror! 3.2Gigapixel camera! (Score:3, Interesting)
The digital camera in this thing generates 15TB of data a day from its 3200megapixel camera. I'm assuming it has an array of sensors, but thats still a ridiculous amazing pixel count.
Re:You know the rule (Score:3, Interesting)
Charles Simonyi gave twice as much as his billness ...he was head of MS Office and has actually been into space ...