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Cosmos Comes to the Web, Thanks to Billionaire
by
findingDulcinea Staff
Charles Simonyi, creator of Microsoft programs Word and Excel, donates $20 million to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Stationed in Chile, the telescope will allow Web users the world over to explore the night sky at resolutions never before seen from Earth.
30-Second Summary
According to Donald Sweeney, the manager of the project, the LSST will allow stargazers to “find out what's going on everywhere in the sky … no one has ever done that before—not even come close.”
Due to go into operation in 2014, from its base on an Andean mountaintop in northern Chile, the telescope will film the southern sky using a 3-billion pixel camera. The data collected—an expected daily average of some 30,000 gigabytes—will be processed by Google.
The detailed shots will help astronomers study phenomena such as dark matter, a mysterious energy that could hold a key to the origins of the universe.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who donated $10 million to the project, called the camera and telescope “a shared resource for all humanity.”
According to his Web site, Charles Simonyi has long been fascinated by the heavens. “Since I was a little boy, space has captivated me,” he writes.
On April 7, 2007, aboard the Soyuz TMA-10, Simonyi became the world’s fifth “space tourist.” He took off from the steppes of Kazakhstan to dock with the International Space Station two days later.
Due to go into operation in 2014, from its base on an Andean mountaintop in northern Chile, the telescope will film the southern sky using a 3-billion pixel camera. The data collected—an expected daily average of some 30,000 gigabytes—will be processed by Google.
The detailed shots will help astronomers study phenomena such as dark matter, a mysterious energy that could hold a key to the origins of the universe.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who donated $10 million to the project, called the camera and telescope “a shared resource for all humanity.”
According to his Web site, Charles Simonyi has long been fascinated by the heavens. “Since I was a little boy, space has captivated me,” he writes.
On April 7, 2007, aboard the Soyuz TMA-10, Simonyi became the world’s fifth “space tourist.” He took off from the steppes of Kazakhstan to dock with the International Space Station two days later.
Headline Links: ‘Movies of the Cosmos Coming to the Web’
Former Microsoft lead software developer Charles Simonyi donated $20 million to the development of a telescope that will film the southern night sky. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, is scheduled to go into operation in northern Chile in 2014. It is set to use a 3-billion pixel camera—the largest digital camera ever to be used—to provide continuous scans. The vast amounts of data will be processed by Google. The search engine is prepping for an average of some 30,000 gigabytes of data per day. Microsoft founder Bill Gates said, “The 8.4-meter LSST telescope and the three gigapixel camera are…a shared resource for all humanity.”
Source: Discovery Channel
Historical Context: The Hubble telescope
Control and communications problems plagued the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Space Telescope Operations Center (STOC) in Greenbelt, Md. on the first scheduled day of transmitting images, April 28, 1990. Deployed from the space shuttle Discovery two days earlier, the Hubble was stuck on automated commands from the ground control center. STOC director Mike Harrington said about the telescope’s mechanisms, “We weren’t able to predict how they would react to Zero G.”
Source: Houston Chronicle
The much-awaited Hubble Space Telescope was found to have a serious design flaw in one of its reflecting mirrors. Due to a defect in a measuring device used in its assembly, a federal panel reported on Sept. 13, 1990 that the mirror would not be able to create images to the desired level of precision.
Source: Houston Chronicle
On Dec. 9, 1993, astronauts on the shuttle Endeavour completed the fifth and final spacewalk to repair the then-maligned Hubble Space Telescope. After three years of off-and-on malfunctioning mostly due to a flaw in the telescope’s main mirror, astronauts installed new gyroscopes, magnetometers and backup power cables, as well as an electronics drive motor that will keep its power cells bathed in sunlight while in orbit. “We planned to do a lot of things on this flight, and we’ve done all of them and extra things,” said Milt Heflin, the head flight director for the NASA mission.
Source: Houston Chronicle
Key Player: Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi was the chief architect of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Blasting off on the Soyuz TMA-10 from the Kazakh steppes on April 7, 2007, Simonyi became the world’s fifth space tourist. The Soyuz TMA–10 docked with the International Space Station two days later. The entire mission is documented on Simonyi’s multimedia Web site. He writes on his home page, “Since I was a little boy, space has captivated me. The possibilities, the unknown, and the courage of the brave, highly skilled people who have blazed a path before me are truly humbling.”
Source: Charles Simonyi’s Web site
Charles Simonyi is America’s 374th wealthiest person. Born in Budapest, Simonyi completed his undergraduate studies at Berkeley and his PhD in computer science in Stanford. After working for Xerox’s PARC lab, he started at Microsoft in 1981, where he crafted Word and Excel.
Source: Forbes
Opinion & Analysis: Techie philanthropy
A blog post on the Web site of Popular Science magazine reflects on the magnitude of the gift Microsoft techies Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates gave to astronomy. “While we're certainly not going to criticize the world's richest man for using so many of his billions to try to solve humanity’s most pressing health problems, it’s nice to see that he’s got a little left over for the cosmos, too,” says writer Gregory Mone.
Source: Popular Science
Donald Sweeney, manager of the LSST Project, said that thanks to the forthcoming telescope, “People can find out what's going on everywhere in the sky, and no one has ever done that before—not even come close.” Scientists will be able to track asteroids potentially on a collision course with Earth, find supernovas and map some 100 billion galaxies. Project spokesperson Suzanne Jacoby called the images expected from the LSST “a flipbook of the sky.”
Source: Physorg.com
Reference Material: The LSST and astronomy
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)’s official Web site has photos and progress updates of the project. The site also includes charts and information on phenomena that the telescope will be able to track better than previous tools—according to LSST.org, “no existing telescope or proposed camera could be re-designed to cover 10 square degrees of sky with a collecting area of 40 square meters”—such as dark matter and the outer reaches of the solar system.
Source: LSST
The American Astronomical Society has guides on astronomy, major projects in the country and information on making a career out of stargazing.
Source: American Astronomical Society
Related Topics: ‘Compute Tycoon Descends from Space’
In April 2007, the space capsule carrying Charles Simonyi made a soft landing on the Kazakh steppe. Fifty-two-year-old Simonyi had become the world’s fifth space tourist, reports findingDulcinea.
Source: findingDulcinea
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