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Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (link below)

Even as he installed the landmark camera that would capture the first convincing evidence of dark energy in the 1990s, Tony Tyson, an experimental cosmologist now at the University of California, Davis, knew it could be better. The camera’s power lay in its ability to collect more data than any other. But digital image sensors and computer processors were progressing so rapidly that the amount of data they could collect and store would soon be limited only by the size of the telescopes delivering light to them, and those were growing too. Confident that engineering trends would hold, Tyson envisioned a telescope project on a truly grand scale, one that could survey hundreds of attributes of billions of cosmological objects as they changed over time.

It would record, Tyson said, “a digital, color movie of the universe.”

Tyson’s vision has come to life as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project, a joint endeavor of more than 40 research institutions and national laboratories that has been ranked by the National Academy of Sciences as its top priority for the next ground-based astronomical facility. Set on a Chilean mountaintop, and slated for completion by the early 2020s, the 8.4-meter LSST will be equipped with a 3.2-billion-pixel digital camera that will scan 20 billion cosmological objects 800 times apiece over the course of a decade. That will generate well over 100 petabytes of data that anyone in the United States or Chile will be able to peruse at will. Displaying just one of the LSST’s full-sky images would require 1,500 high-definition TV screens.

Simon Foundation: A Digital Copy of the Universe, Encrypted