SAN DIEGO, Jan. 8 — In the near future, anyone with a computer modem and a clever idea may be able to explore the cosmos in a virtual space observatory — online.
THE IDEA of a national virtual observatory, offered as part of the U.S. space community’s plan for the next decade, could become reality within five years at an estimated cost of $25 million, and a global version could be in place by 2010, according to Stephen Strom, head of planning and development at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
A lot of astronomical data is already available to the public, through NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Canada. But what scientists envision, in an effort being discussed at this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, is a complete archive of the burgeoning observations from telescopes on the ground and orbiting Earth.
The sheer amount of data can be daunting, because of parallel explosions in the 1990s in the ability of space scientists to collect material and in the capacity of computers to store it, Strom said by telephone from Tucson, Ariz.
“There is a revolution in detective ability; every 18 months, our ability to image the sky doubles,” Strom said. Right now, there are many terabytes — trillions of bytes — of astronomical data available for study. By the end of the decade, the amount of data will be many petabytes. Each petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.
By contrast, a personal computer these days is considered to have a large memory if its hard drive can hold 20 gigabytes, or 20 billion bytes of information.
Want to learn more?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/513184.asp
------------------
-Administrator / Owner
"Everything was true. God was an astronaut. Oz really is over the
rainbow. ...and Midian is where the monsters live." -Nightbreed
THE IDEA of a national virtual observatory, offered as part of the U.S. space community’s plan for the next decade, could become reality within five years at an estimated cost of $25 million, and a global version could be in place by 2010, according to Stephen Strom, head of planning and development at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
A lot of astronomical data is already available to the public, through NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Canada. But what scientists envision, in an effort being discussed at this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, is a complete archive of the burgeoning observations from telescopes on the ground and orbiting Earth.
The sheer amount of data can be daunting, because of parallel explosions in the 1990s in the ability of space scientists to collect material and in the capacity of computers to store it, Strom said by telephone from Tucson, Ariz.
“There is a revolution in detective ability; every 18 months, our ability to image the sky doubles,” Strom said. Right now, there are many terabytes — trillions of bytes — of astronomical data available for study. By the end of the decade, the amount of data will be many petabytes. Each petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.
By contrast, a personal computer these days is considered to have a large memory if its hard drive can hold 20 gigabytes, or 20 billion bytes of information.
Want to learn more?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/513184.asp
------------------
-Administrator / Owner
"Everything was true. God was an astronaut. Oz really is over the
rainbow. ...and Midian is where the monsters live." -Nightbreed