New Telescope to Scan ENTIRE sky every 3 days

Thank You Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi for the donation. This new telescope will cover the entire night sky every 3 days.

www.msnbc.msn.com...



[edit on 5-1-2008 by harddrive21]

NICE!

I like good news instead of bad news all the time

Something of a coincidence that the object expected to have at least a close encounter with Mars is just days away.

And the next thing that comes to mind is how long this has been up and running? I know it's just officially came up, but surely there was a testing phase?

My bad, ready in 2015. I missed that.

[edit on 5-1-2008 by NGC2736]

reply to post by NGC2736


I wish this was running now. It won't be ready for about 7 more years. But it will be all digital, have the pics ready the next day and be in the Southern Hemisphere (now all we need is one in the Northern Hemisphere). It should be up and running when we have the James Webb Telescope up. But as the earlier post said - it's nice to have good news and no doomsday predictions.

“LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it,” Gates said...

Thank You Capitalism!

It's not really the entire sky though. Can't see Polaris.

Terabytes of information - all that data, so little time. I wonder if it will be a SETI@home kind of deal? You can look at the pics if they borrow some bandwidth and processing power to look for asteroids, comets or extrasolar planets.

Nice catch , harddrive'

Here are a few more links of interest.

LSST homepage

Site in Northern Chile Selected for Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Originally posted by apc
...
It's not really the entire sky though. Can't see Polaris.

Still, pretty impressive tracking movement capabilities ...

Telescope_Animation_Horizon_Zenith_25FPS.avi (85megs)

If only this thing was up and running today! Then we could scan the galaxy for "Planet X", prove it doesn't exist, and eliminate a good portion of the annoying threads on this site!

And because one-sentence posts are illegal here, I should mention that I like rainbow sprinkles on my soft serve ice cream.

reply to post by Rasputin13


Don't you realize that soft serve ice cream is what is pulling planet X this direction? Those Xtillians can't resist it.

Good links there JBird. I hope this technology gets up faster than expected. It seems I've waited my whole life for the things that are now starting to happen.

Originally posted by NGC2736
...It seems I've waited my whole life for the things that are now starting to happen.

I Hear ya , NGC' !

But then I tell myself, it's our destiny to perpetually be on the cusp of the next grand discovery.

And then I tell myself, that many of my past fantasy discoveries have indeed become reality. (The Voyager missions come to mind )

Yea, that works for about 2weeks then I'm back lamenting the possibility I may never know the Supreme secrets of the Universe.

Ahhhh oh yea... the LSST

Seems it has a rival - Pan-STARRS

Pan-STARRS (an acronym for Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System) is a planned astronomical survey that will conduct astrometry and photometry of much of the entire sky on a continuous basis.

pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu

[edit on 6-1-2008 by Jbird]

Pan-STARRS is great! It will cover the Northern Hemisphere while LSST covers the Southern Hemisphere. All I will need when this is ready is the highest speed of internet connection, 2 quad core computers with 4 gigs of ram and as much Rockstar Energy Drinks as I can find.
Good find JStar for the Sister Telescope.

From Pan-STARRS site...

Is Pan-STARRS the same as the LARGE SYNOPTIC SURVeY Telescope (LSST)?

No. Pan-STARRS will have a smaller collecting area than the LSST as recommended in the decadal report. However, we expect that it will do much, but not all, of the science proposed for the LSST at something like 20-25% the cost of the larger project.

...PS1 is essentially one quarter of Pan-STARRS...

...PS1 allows us to test all the technology that is being developed for Pan-STARRS, including the telescope design, the cameras and the data reduction software. PS1 will be used to make a full-sky survey that will provide astrometric and photometric calibration data that will be used for the full Pan-STARRS survey.

Says 3- 5 years of testing with the PS1 (completed in Aug.07), but I didn't find a completion date estimate, or a construction-time estimate, for a completed 'scope.

But appears, it could be completed before LSST.

[edit on 6-1-2008 by Jbird]

Smaller collecting area? Still not bad! It would take 4 days to cover the entire sky. And 3 days for LSST. So in the span of 120 days we will have a ton of data encompassing the entire sky (north and south). We should be able to then see every thing coming at us (asteroid, comet and Planet X). Just think of all the new discoveries that will occur within the first year. The PS4 configuration for the Pan-STARRS will take a 2 Gigabyte picture and have a total of 10 Terabytes each night...Time to start buying up soem Western Digital Hard Drives.
LSST on the other hand will have 30 Terabytes per night. LSST will also be able to do the following :

And here's the link : en.wikipedia.org...