In the August issue of Astronomy Magazine, associate editor Eric Betz discusses the development of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
Once it is ready in 2018, this $70M "megascope" will image galaxies up to 10 billion light years away and pinpoint the locations of 25 million galaxies and quasars. Moore Foundation grantee and DESI project director Michael Levi of Berkeley Lab says the instrument will "in its first night of observation...record more data than anyone else has at that kind of cosmological depth."
However, the launch of DESI and other megascopes such as the Thirty Meter Telescope means older telescopes--including others on Kitt Peak--will have to reduce open-access operations, find new funders, or close down entirely.
The article also discusses the "ferocious quantities of computational power" needed to analyze data from the new megascopes.
The full article is available in the August 2015 issue of Astronomy Magazine. Read a summary here.
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