NEW YORK: Google has become part of a group of universities, national laboratories and private foundations, which is building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to probe into the mysteries of the universe.
The telescope, to become operational in 2013, has a three billion pixel digital camera, which is capable of surveying the whole of visible sky in multiple colors every week. It is particularly scheduled to look into the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and will provide a colorful glimpse on celestial objects that change or move rapidly like the exploding supernovae, near-earth asteroids and the Kuiper Belt objects.
The decade-long survey is expected to generate more than 30,000 gigabytes of image data every night and Google's participation in the project is to ensure that this massive data is properly and organized and preserved for proper and easy use.
Donald Sweeney, project manager for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope said Google will help organize "the seemingly overwhelming volumes of collected data" into a database, which will make discoveries available in real time for scientists and non-scientists alike.
William Coughran, Google's vice president of engineering said the company's mission is to take the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. He said the data from the project will be an important part of the world's information, and by being involved in the project Google hopes to make it easier for that data to become accessible and useful.
The telescope was originally designed at the University of Arizona by Regents' professor of astronomy Roger Angel. The university, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Research Corporation and the University of Washington are the founding members of the LSST Corporation. Among its current members are Brookhaven National Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Johns Hopkins University, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology - Stanford University, Las Cumbres Observatory Inc., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Princeton University, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University of California at Davis, University of California at Irvine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Pennsylvania. Now Google has joined these illustrious organizations.
