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5,000 Robots to Build 3D Map of the Universe

posted by n1 on Wednesday August 10 2016, @07:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the robot-hell dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Five thousand robots will get busy creating a 3D map of millions of galaxies in 2019.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has received US Department of Energy (DoE) approval to move from the design phase to construction, which will start next year.

That includes building the 5,000 10 cm-long, finger-width robots which will have the job of aiming fibre-optic cables at galaxies, stars, and quasars.

DESI's builders have just begun a two-month prototype run of the light collection system in Arizona.

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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:17PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:17PM (#386369)

    Sounds like they are simulating between 1 and 6 larger telescopes with a whole bunch of small ones.

    They probably need to make sure the fibre is all the same length and that the robots all point in the same direction. They probably have a very narrow field of view.

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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:24PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:24PM (#386370)

    Michael H.F. Wilkinson writes:

    The Sloan Digital Sky Survey release 12 has far more objects: 208,478,448 galaxies to be precise. It only contains spectra for 2,401,952 galaxies and 477,161 quasars, so DESI becomes particularly interesting because it captures spectra of so many objects.

    Pointing an optical fibre directly at the sky is of course pointless, as the aperture is pathetically small. The trick is to get a big mirror (4 m in this case), which gathers a lot of photons, and use fibre optics to guide the light to (multiple) spectroscopes. The more usual trick is to use a slit, which captures spectra from a little stripe across the image plane. By using carefully placed fibre optics, the project (as I read it) wants to tap into more of the optical plane, to record spectra of far more objects simultaneously. The robots pick out the right bits of the image from which to obtain spectra. Sounds very interesting