Will Google save the earth from a horrible fate?
Hollywood makes movies about it. Certain TV channels are constantly showing programs about it. Chronic worriers fret about it. Astronomers calculate it. “It”, in this case, is the doomsday scenario where a big chunk of something from outer space collides with the earth and wipes most of us out. Fortunately, the odds against this are pretty high but the possible consequences are so horrendous that even very small probablities are a concern.
Finding and keeping track of the orbits of everything of any size in our region of space is a big technical problem and involves a lot of computing. Huge databases are involved and Google is going to help with its expertise on searching and indexing huge quantities of data. ComputerWorld describes the overall effort:
IT systems will a play role in discovering future threats. In particular, there’s an effort called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), involving 20 universities and national labs to build a large telescope on a 8,800-foot mountain peak in northern Chile, called Cerro Pachon. This telescope will have the potential of finding asteroids as small as 100 meters.
Once it begins operation in 2013, the LSST is expected to generate 30,000 gigabytes of data per night. In total, petabytes (1 petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes) of data will be created in what may well become the world’s largest database. The project is expected to cost about $467 million, said Donald Sweeney, LSST project manager.
Google joined the effort last month. “They are going to help us with how the data is served and indexed — how do you find stuff in petabytes of data,” Sweeney said.
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