by Jason Snell
Big telescope, big data
Kenneth Chang and Iera Hwang of the New York Times take a deep dive into the unique data challenges of the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is powered by a 3.2 gigapixel camera:
Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture…. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.
Although Rubin will take a thousand images a night, those are not what will be sent out into the world at first. Rather, the computers at SLAC will create small snapshots of what has changed compared with what the telescope saw previously… Just one image will contain about 10,000 highlighted changes. An alert will be generated for each change — some 10 million alerts a night.
Storing, transmitting, and disseminating that much data leads to some interesting problems, like having enough storage onsite in case of outages, stringing fiberoptic cable across the Atacama desert, and processing the images to provide manageable data for astronomers to access remotely.