New National Virtual Observatory

Using a grant from the National Science Foundation, astronomers in the US are creating a "virtual observatory," that will be accessible to both professionals and laypersons. The ten million dollar grant will build a National Virtual Observatory (NVO) which will bring together astronomical information from all over the world and make it available to anyone over the internet.

As has been shown with open source software, when you make information freely available to people, good things can come of it. In a way, it would be creating an open source movement in astronomy. "I can imagine entire research projects being done from NVO data," says Bob Hanisch, the NVO project manager and an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

The model for the NVO is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an electronic catalog of 100 million celestial objects, encoded in databases and viewable from a Web portal. The NVO will take the Sloan survey and combine it with other, surveys, including some maintained by the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and European Union.

The NVO is about much more than just telescope images of the cosmos collected into databases. The idea is to connect hardware platforms which can then unite research center servers into high speed powerful supercomputers. The NVO will depend on grid computing and should be a good candidate to prove its usefulness because of astronomy's large but manageable amount of free, publicly available data.

Some of the challenges which the NVO architects must conquer is that not only will they have to manage large and fundamentally different databases, some on Oracle, some SQL and they must be able to work together. Those databases must be able to work with the software which analyzes the information.

To avoid bandwidth saturation, the databases will not all be on the same servers. Bandwidth may still be an issue though if the queries are complex. NVO will likely have additional servers which will take over complex queries from smaller remote PC's.

It is likely that other disciplines will be watching the NVO to see how well it works and to perhaps follow in their footsteps. The NVO may be the first step in science becoming a truly global cooperative endeavor.

Constellations

The Solar System