Construction approved for world's most powerful digital camera | Hacker News Reader

Construction approved for world's most powerful digital camera

symmetrymagazine.org

31 pointsdnetesn16 comments

>The telescope’s camera—the size of a small car and weighing more than three tons—will capture full-sky images at such high resolution that it would take 1500 high-definition television screens to display just one of them.

If that sentence doesn't sound particularly impressive, that's because it's wrong. Each exposure only covers 3.5 degrees, and the telescope will take a 15 second exposure every 20 seconds for hours. The full image will apparently be 8.4 terapixels.

It isn't wrong. It is saying it would take 1500 monitors just to view one exposure, not the full stitched together image.

It clearly says a "full-sky image" would take 1500 monitors. Which is a pretty image but nowhere near as impressive as the actual detail level.

Why is the DOE getting so involved in astronomy/cosmology? I know they are big supporters of science, but normally that science has some relationship to energy or atomic weapons (example: National ignition facility). I don't see how a telescope to map stars and measure dark energy fits into their mandate.

Or is this thing part of the new space fence? Is it to be located in the south to spot spysats and/or debris in polar orbits?

DOE's mandate is pretty large and covers many basic science projects. DOE funded the human genome project back when NIH thought it was a waste of money. I don't think it's related to any DOD projects.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/sites/default/files/images/s...

Wow, is it just me, or is that design just needlessly complicated. I'm trying very hard to think of a good reason why they did that, but really can't. Anyone?

It's just you. Form follows function.

I hope they also approved the construction of the supercomputer to work on the images!

Some of the radio interferometer telescopes actually do require some of the most powerful supercomputers ever built, just to assemble their "images". E.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOFAR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array

This is awesome! We always seem to get tremendous bang for our buck in building ever larger and more precise tools.

Question though, is there a realistic timeline or project for building a similar telescope as this, but in Space?

The James Webb (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope) is going to be launched in 2018. At 6.5m, it's in the same class as the 8.4m LSST.

If you put something like this in space, and pointed it down, would it be a useful espionage tool (more useful than the spy satellites the US and its allies already have)?

I don't know the technical details of this project, but it's well known that Hubble's basic design matches the spy satellites being manufactured at the same time. They changed the size of the mirror so they could source the part from the same manufacturing resources as the spy satellite program.

Another fun bit of trivia is that at one time the NRO (folks who operate the spy satellites) offered two they had in storage to NASA.

So in general I'd say it's a safe bet most of this technology is dual use. It's likely the secret squirrel folks are ahead of what open science projects can use however, given the resources available.

I suspect at this kind of resolution bandwidth getting the images down from space might be a big limitation.

The article was lacking technical details. I assume this is an array of CCD. What the resolution of each device?

That's also ~16 TB/day of data? Is all that archived, or are only the differences stored?

Full storage at multiple locations. This is only a few petabytes a year, so it's not a lot of data.

Will this help detect Near Earth Objects that could possibly impact the Earth?

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/

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