Google has joined a team made by 19 American universities and Labs to create a Large Synoptic Survey Telescope - LSST.

Scheduled to begin operations in 2013, the 8.4-meter LSST will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera. The telescope will probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and it will open a movie-like window on objects that change or move rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids as small as 100 meters, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects.

…

“The LSST will be the world’s most powerful survey telescope, with vast data management challenges,” Donald Sweeney, LSST project manager, said. “LSST engineers and scientists have been collaborating with Google on number of these exciting opportunities. Even though the universe is very old, exciting things happen every second. The LSST will be able to find these events hundreds of times better than today’s other big telescopes. Google will help us organize and present the seemingly overwhelming volumes of data collected by the LSST.”

The requirements of this project are kind of impossible for normal user to imagine. This system will be using around 30 Terrabyte/Day of images (30000 GB/Day). The role of Google will be challenging in order to make a really useful knowledge based system out of these images.

Will the Adwords users be bidding to show their ads on some constellations? I don’t think so!

Actually I can’t wait to see details on Mercury or even Pluto