An astronomical data challenge

Manuel Gnida in Symmetry:

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope—scheduled to come online in the early 2020s—will use a 3.2-gigapixel camera to photograph a giant swath of the heavens. It’ll keep it up for 10 years, every night with a clear sky, creating the world’s largest astronomical stop-motion movie.

The results will give scientists both an unprecedented big-picture look at the motions of billions of celestial objects over time, and an ongoing stream of millions of real-time updates each night about changes in the sky.

Accomplishing both of these tasks will require dealing with a lot of data, more than 20 terabytes each day for a decade. Collecting and storing the enormous volume of raw data, turning it into processed data that scientists can use, distributing it among institutions all over the globe, and doing all of this reliably and fast requires elaborate data management and technology.

More here.