How Vera Rubin Telescope Scientists Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery

It was not that long ago that astronomers would spend a night looking through a telescope, making careful observations of one or a few points of light.

Based on those few observations, they would extrapolate broad generalizations about the universe.

“It was all people could really do at the time, because it was hard to collect data,” said Leanne Guy, the data management scientist at the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

Rubin, located in Chile and financed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, will inundate astronomers with data.

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.