In the days
of astronomers like Edwin Hubble and Alan Sandage, before computers were
widespread, using observatory telescopes to study the cosmos was grueling work.
Astronomers
had to climb atop platforms on the sides of the giant instruments and constantly
monitor the night sky to keep in focus those stars whose light were being slowly
collected onto photographic plates.
"They
would be up there for hours, in the cold and dark by themselves," said
Scott Kardel, a spokesman for the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
A
telescope's speed had to be continually adjusted by tapping buttons on a
control paddle, and on the morning after a cold night, an astronomer might find
that his tears had frozen him to the eyepiece.
But those
days are long gone. Automated
telescopes are now doing work once done by tortured astronomers, and thanks
to a new high speed wireless microwave network, today's digitally captured
images can be beamed down from mountain observatories and quickly distributed
to astronomers living thousands of miles away.
Called the
High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network, or HPWREN for short,
it can transfer data at 45 megabits-per-second, or about 30 times faster than
today's fastest DSL connections. One megabit is equal to 1 million bits.
A key
instrument
Future
upgrades are expected to make the network even faster, said Hans-Werner Braun,
the HPWREN principal investigator and a research scientist at the San Diego Computer Center at the University of California, San Diego.
"The
current plan is to upgrade critical links that support the [Palomar]
observatory to 155 Mbps and create a redundant 45 Mbps path for a combined 200
megabits-per-second access speed at the observatory," Braun said.
Last
summer, HPWREN helped astronomers using a Palomar telescope to discover a rocky
object located on the outer fringes of our solar system beyond Pluto.
Kardel says
the 48-inch Samuel Oschin
Telescope used to spot the new world was still using glass photographic
plates to capture images as recently as 2000.
After
exposure, "a plate had to be taken down to a darkroom, developed and then
scanned before it was written to some form of medium and hand-carried to
someone doing research in a lab," Kardel told SPACE.com.
Today, the
Samuel Oschin Telescope uses a 161 mega-pixel digital camera to observe the
cosmos and the data is beamed wirelessly down the mountain using HPWREN.
By allowing
astronomers quick access to collected data, the wireless network is also
proving instrumental in the hunt for extrasolar
planets, as well as in the study of Type 1a
supernovas, exploding stars that serve as "standard
candles" for measuring the expansion
of the universe.
Other
uses
Telescopes
at Palomar can use up to 200 million bytes of storage space a night, Braun
said.
After
images are beamed down from the mountain observatories, they are distributed to
astronomers at different universities and research institutions using
"Internet2," a high speed data network many times faster than typical
home internet connections.
Today, an
astronomer at Yale in Connecticut can download a 100 megabyte image
taken by an automated telescope in California in less than 30 seconds.
Operational
since 2001, HPWREN is also changing how scientists do research in fields
besides astronomy. Seismologists are using the network to gather data from
remote survey stations and wildlife researchers are using it to observe how
wolves behave in the wild using wireless cameras.
The
California Department of Forestry is also using gear that taps into HPWREN to
set up local command posts during forest fires.
But the field
most affected by the technology might be astronomy. Gone are the days when
astronomers had to lock themselves up in mountain observatories and chain
themselves to telescopes for entire nights.
"Astronomers
can have a life, sleep and be with their families," Kardel said.
"It's allowed us to make much more efficient use of telescope time.
There's no more wasting of hours and hours on something that might not go
right."
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