Friday, April 27, 2012

NOW THAT IS A TELESCOPE post by Daniel Trowler

A project that was conceived well over a decade ago in 1998 has gotten the go ahead from the U.S. department of Energy. A giant 3.2 billion pixel telescope is what scientists have in mind that will continuously take picture of our universe for 10 years. Over the ten year span this super camera will create a sort of time lapse picture show that will provide scientists will almost limitless knowledge of the universe. This project is still in its first stages and since it has the go ahead scientist will begin with the designs.

Ideally the telescope will gather 6 million gigabytes of data a year and some of its main aims are to inform us about dark energy, dark matter, and the Kuiper belt which is where Pluto resides. You might also call it a doomsday prevention device as it will be used to track asteroids and other harmful space entities that are close to earth.
The most interesting thing about this project is that the data will be public so anyone will be able to log in online and view the pictures. The location of the telescope will be on top of the Cerro Pachon mountain in Northern Chile and will begin being construction in 2014.




1 comment:

  1. When someone refers to a name like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Sir Isaac Newton a gong is sure to band. The awesome thoughts of our previous that modified the globe in the area of Astronomy as we now know will never be overlooked. Each one of these men created awesome findings about the galaxy that is the galaxy and excluding Copernicus; the conclusions which modified everything were done with a telescope.
    telescope.

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