VST Surveys
The primary function of the VST is to support the Very Large Telescope by providing surveys — both extensive, multi-colour imaging surveys and more specific searches for rare astronomical objects. Three have already been planned as part of the Public Surveys Project, and they are anticipated to take five years to carry out. These are the Kilo-Degree Survey (KIDS), VST ATLAS and the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane (VPHAS+). They will focus on a wide range of astronomical issues from searching for highly energetic quasars to understanding the nature of dark energy. More information about the surveys can be found on the ESO - The VST Surveys website.
The data volume produced by OmegaCAM will be large. About 30 terabytes of raw data will be produced per year and will flow back into data centres in Europe for processing. A novel and sophisticated software system has been developed at Groningen and Naples to handle the very large data flow. The end products from the processing will be huge lists of the objects found, as well as images, and these will be made available to astronomers worldwide for scientific analysis. Funding for the data analysis was uncertain in 2011.
Read more about this topic: VLT Survey Telescope
Famous quotes containing the word surveys:
“The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)