New Frontiers in Astronomy

Presented at the US Library of Congress

Transcript

1. New Frontiers in Astronomy Dr Alberto Conti Space Telescope Science Institute
2. April 2006 • Visible – Hubble Space Telescope • Gamma rays - Compton Gamma Ray Obs. • X-rays - Chandra X-ray Observatory • Infrared - Spitzer Space Telescope
3. Optimize the science from community-led astrophysics missions and projects. Develop, nurture, and share innovations in space astronomy science operations. Collaborate on the next generation of space astrophysics programs. Community Missions Office
4. Astronomy Project Timeline A Partial List of Key Astrophysics Facilities Start date and Probable Duration HST Spitzer Chandra FUSE GALEX GLAST Kepler WMAP JWST SWIFT Beyond Einstein XMM SOFIA INTEGRAL Ares V Flights Herschel - Planck WISE NVO Operations ALMA TMT LSST PANSTARRS NVO Development SDSS VLT & Gemini Observatories SIM? TPF? 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
5. Astronomy Project Timeline STScI Project and Mission Activity HST Spitzer Chandra FUSE GALEX GLAST Kepler WMAP JWST SWIFT Beyond Einstein XMM SOFIA INTEGRAL Ares V Flights Herschel - Planck WISE NVO Operations ALMA TMT LSST PANSTARRS NVO Development SIM? TPF? SDSS VLT & Gemini Observatories Start date and Probable Duration 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
6. Community Missions Microsoft WWT MAST Kepler
10. Computer Science Biology Economics Medicine Government Astronomy Massive amounts of information
11. New Science Paradigm for Astronomy
12. Astronomy is changing Old days: photographic plates 1960: astronomical goes digital Instruments collect 100 GB/ night Detectors follow Moore’s Law Total data doubles every 2 years Growth over 25 years is a factor of 30 in glass, 3000 in pixels ?
13. Challenges for the Future Space is big! For one picture you need a 2 Trillion pixels camera! Monochrome : 4 Terabytes or 5% of the Library of Congress Color: 100 Terabytes or the 21% more than the entire Library of Congress Time: 10 Petabytes or 120 times the entire Library of Congress New analysis & visualization tools are required
14. Adapt or Perish Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth have revolutionized the way we look at our planet. We proposed a new synergistic approach to the challenge of bringing the universe to our desktops
15. Old Public Data Access •Many observatories •Individual interfaces Mission A Mission B Mission C Observatory X Observatory Y
16. New Science Paradigm: First Iteration •Data Standards •Protocols } Mission A Mission B Mission C Observatory X Observatory Y
17. New Science Paradigm: Second Iteration Data Standards, Protocols, Mining Tools Mission A Mission B Mission C Observatory X Observatory Y Metadata
18. New Science Paradigm Problems • Technology is trumping science • Many distributed services are unreliable • Little idea of what users are doing and why • Complex, difficult to use • Moving data around is hard • Hard for user to publish their own data
19. 19 Challenges • Reduce obstacles to Capturing, Organizing, Summarizing, Analyzing, Visualizing, and Curating • Consider data and algorithms as “the product” • Adopt semantic technologies to enable automated metadata tagging, clustering and mining • Transition to the new astronomy • Sociological issues
20. NASA Data Centers Int’l Data Centers Individual Users Kitchen Sink New Science Paradigm: Science 2.0
21. NASA Data Centers Int’l Data Centers User Database Kitchen Sink Browsers
22. • We must partner with other academic disciplines: Computer Science, Statistics, ... • We must leverage partnerships with industry interested in enabling Science 2.0 • We must learn to be humble and ask for help • We must remember that we have the greatest datasets in the world (universe really!)
23. Dr Alberto Conti aconti@stsci.edu Dr Carol Christian carolc@stsci.edu Collaborator With thanks to Brian McLean Josh Perlow Tony Rogers Bernie Shiao Shui-ay Tseng