Earth's Radio Telescopes Combining Forces 119
Slatterz writes "I own a basic 70mm telescope, which I'm sure Galileo would have given his right arm for in 1609. In fact, this year marks exactly 400 years since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the skies — discovering the moons of Jupiter and helping to prove that the universe doesn't revolve around us. As a mark of respect, the United Nations has declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy. Official festivities kick off this week in Paris and, to help start the celebrations, 17 radio telescopes in Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas will track three quasars using something called "real-time Very Long Baseline Interferometry" — basically creating hi-res images by combining their data to simulate a telescope as large as the Earth. Sounds cool."
Re:This is called eVLBI (Score:2, Insightful)
The same technology may prove to be very useful for P2P services [ietf.org].
Indeed. One of the biggest problems with P2P in general is all the congestion it creates by opening so many simultaneous connections. P2P could be much more useful for these kinds of background transfers that are obviously best for scenarios like eLVBI.
With a 'less than best effort' strategy, you'll end up only using the 'extra' or 'leftover' bandwidth and not your whole pipe.
The story the other day about a P2P firewall (which has other more glaringly obvious problems than just being P2P) could make use of this technology as well.
If nothing else... (Score:3, Insightful)