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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:24PM (#386371)

    small apertures cannot get enough resolution to isolate the light of a given object.

    After thinking about this, it occurred to me it may not matter. If the light of a few objects get mixed together, than statistical methods can be used to isolate the spectrum of each as long as you know or can determine generally what kind of objects are included. The project's main job is to measure the red-shift, not study specific chemicals etc. in the spectrum such that overlapping spectrum will generally not matter as long as the shifts of multiple objects are not close. The handful that have close shifts can probably be followed up using traditional methods.