Data-driven Discovery & The Most Ambitious Telescopes Ever Built

Presented at Future Assembly 2016 – Australia's Emergent Technology Festival Melbourne, Australia

Official website: https://futureassembly.io/

Transcript

1. Data–driven Discovery & The Most Ambitious Telescopes Ever Built @drarnakarick – astronomer by trade / scientific computing consultant
2. This is a story about the telescopes of the future
3. But before we start, let’s take a quick look at the past
4. 1600s: Systematic use of Refracting Telescopes
5. 1910 – 80s: Modern Astronomy Observatories
6. 1958: National Aeronautical Space Administration
7. 1960 – 70s: Radio Telescopes & Arrays
8. 1990: Hubble Space Telescope – HST
9. 1990: Hubble Space Telescope – HST
10. 1995: Hubble Deep Field – HDF
11. 2001–2006+ Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics Very Large Telescope (VLT) – Paranal
12. 2004 – 2014: Hubble eXtreme Ultra Deep Field – XUDF
13. 2009: Kepler Space Telescope – Exoplanet Explosion
14. 2016: First detection of Gravitational Waves
15. So this is where we at now
16. Now let’s talk about the Next–Generation Large Telescopes
17. GMT – Chile 2025+ E-ELT – Chile 2024+ SKA – Australia 2023+ SKA – South Africa 2023+ LSST – Chile 2020 JWST – Space 2018
18. So why am I ridiculously excited about the next–generation telescopes?
19. Massive projects – in every way. They are driving new technologies & fundamentally changing the way we approach data–intensive astronomy research
20. 2018: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
21. JWST Technology
22. JWST Science  
23. 2023: Large Synoptic Sky Survey (LSST) El Penon, Chile “Opening a Window of Discovery on the Dynamic Universe…” 3.2 Gigapixel camera
24. LSST will be an epic data mining project 10s of billions of stars & galaxies 10 million alerts, 1000s exposures, ~30TB per night Will require new tools, data analysis techniques & sophisticated ML algorithms Backed by supercomputing power Leveraging the Tech Industry & “Data Science” Machine Learning Startups – wise.io Data will be public from day one – rapid science
25. 2020: Square Kilometre Array – SKA South Africa & Australia “The Ultimate Big-Data or Astronomy IT experiment” Antennas will produce data streams several times the global internet traffic.
26. Phase 1 SKA will produce 160TB of raw data per second! Will drive development of new detector & computing technologies Remote locations are a challenge – power, communication ,network and cooling considerations Australia’s pathfinders will run on hybrid solar–biodiesel Teaming up with companies like IBM, Intel, Amazon, NVIDIA to find solutions Phase 2 technology doesn’t yet exist!
27. The SKA will solve some of the Universe’s biggest mysteries  
28. If astronomers weren’t already busy enough, new ground & space telescopes (~2040s, post–JWST ) have already been proposed…
29. But that’s another story… www.arnakarick.com/futureassembly2016/