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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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5,000 Robots to Build 3D Map of the Universe
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Advancement in position.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:25PM
I was surprised to learn from an astrophysicist friend that the way of obtaining spectroscopy of stars in telescope images was literally to place fibre optics on an image screen of the telescope (where you see the stars as an image) that take the light from the image of that star to the stectrometer. Several fibres can be placed at the same time and multiple spectra obtained simultaneously.
I'd imagined some fancy spectroscopic image sensor would take the place of the camera in a regular telescope, but that doesn't exist apparently.
This sounds like a big automated version of that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:48PM
So there is to be a big lens(es) or mirror(s) above or feeding focused light to this bucket-looking thing?