A recent chat with the observatory team, as reported by The New York Times, delved into the jaw-dropping details. Apparently, each image taken by the telescope’s camera boasts a whopping 3.2 billion pixels, representing 65,536 shades of gray. On average, the data in one photo amounts to roughly 6.4 GB.
These images are whisked off to nearby servers to free up space for more snapshots. The plan is to keep revisiting the same spots for at least ten years. The crew predicts a colossal amount of data will be churned out, estimating a minimum accumulation of 60 billion bytes (around 60,000 TB) by project’s end.
While the team assumes a grand total of 60,000 TB for the data volume, multiple factors might sway the outcome. They even hint that the figure could balloon to a massive 500,000 TB. Dr. O’Mullane, the data production associate director at the observatory, hints that handling such mammoth data with the help of AI would be a smarter move.
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The data gets zipped over to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, part of the Energy Research Center in Menlo Park, California. A 60-mile stretch of fiber optic cable links the data hub to La Serena in Chile, ensuring seamless passage. It’s at this lab that fresh images are compared to older ones from the same celestial region to spot any changes. Once they nail down anomalies, they dive deep into analyzing them.
To wrangle all this data, a data hub was erected at Rubin, equipped to store a month’s worth of data locally in case of networking glitches. It acts as a fail-safe to safeguard their work. They also venture into examining the data on-site before sending it for further scrutiny.
Imagine trying to grasp just how much data makes up our digital world. Now consider the mind-boggling amount of data captured by a single observatory watching over outer space. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, situated in Chile, snaps about 1,000 photos daily of the night sky.
