World's Largest Digital Camera Project Passes Critical Milestone 73
An anonymous reader writes in with a link about the progress of one of the coolest astronomy projects around. "A 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera designed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is now one step closer to reality. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope camera, which will capture the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed, has received 'Critical Decision 1' approval by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to move into the next stage of the project. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics."
Dark matter... lulz (Score:0, Interesting)
Amazing the lengths people will go to discount the huge role of electricity in space.
Actually Arthur C. Clarke (as usual) proposed this (Score:4, Interesting)
In one of his short stories, (I believe) after a near miss by an earth grazing asteroid (sliced through the upper atmosphere over a major city), a very large (gigaton) bomb is detonated in earth's orbit in a position diametrically opposed to the earth. The resulting "flash" resulted in a radar pulse (remember that was Clarke's early training in WWII) that was used to illuminate all the objects in the solar system. This was recorded and catalogued.
Decades later, an extra-terrestrial signal is recorded from another star system. After a quick calculation, it is apparent that the aliens, upon detecting the flash of this giga-bomb, quickly responded with a reply aimed at our solar system.