When Wayne Rosing was vice president of engineering for Google, his job was to tame the Web. Now he's tackling something even more disorganized: space.
Rosing crunches data for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. By 2012, the federally funded project's astronomers plan to begin cataloging the entire sky with high-resolution digital photographs. The camera, designed to complete the 42-terabyte task every three days, will capture uncharted asteroids, exploding suns, far-off galaxies, and - with luck - phenomena the research team has never imagined. "The camera will see things that may be there for only one or two or three minutes," Rosing says. "I'm very interested in figuring out what this tells us about the universe."
Pulling down images with the project's $200 million telescope (to be located in either Chile or Mexico) may be the easy part. More difficult: keeping track of all the information. "Six gigabytes comes out of that camera every 10 seconds. You basically have to absorb that data, calibrate it, and do first-order analysis of it in 10 seconds," Rosing says. "If it piles up, you'll never catch up." Sounds like a job for someone from Google.
- David Shiga
credit:Loan Nguyen; stars: Getty Images
Wayne Rosing
START
Star Search
