HPCwire: High Performance Wireless Network Aids Astronomers

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August 18, 2006

High Performance Wireless Network Aids Astronomers

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Combining computer and communications skills, experts at the University of California San Diego are helping colleagues at the California Institute of Technology share the massive amounts of data produced by astronomers' investigations of the cosmos.

For the past three years, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory in Southern California have been using the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) as the data transfer cyberinfrastructure to further our understanding of the universe.

HPWREN is staffed by researchers at UC San Diego's San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), and San Diego State University (SDSU).

Recent applications include the study of some of the most cataclysmic explosions in the universe, the hunt for extrasolar planets, and the discovery of our solar system's tenth planet. The data for all this research is transferred via HPWREN from the remote mountain observatory to college campuses hundreds of miles away.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, HPWREN provides Palomar Observatory with a high-speed network connection that helps enable new ways of undertaking astronomy research consistent with the data demands of today's scientists. Specifically, the HPWREN bandwidth allows astronomers to transfer a 100 MB image from a telescope camera at Palomar to their campus laboratories in less than 30 seconds.

"The Palomar Observatory is by far our most bandwidth-demanding partner," says Hans-Werner Braun, HPWREN principal investigator, a research scientist with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. "Palomar is able to run the 45 megabits-per-second HPWREN backbone flat out and will be able to utilize substantially more bandwidth in the future. The current plan is to upgrade critical links that support the observatory to 155 Mbps and create a redundant 45 Mbps path for a combined 200 megabits-per-second access speed at the observatory."

Last summer astronomers making use of the Palomar 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope announced the discovery of what some are calling our solar system's tenth planet. The object has been confirmed to be larger than Pluto. The telescope uses a 161-million-pixel camera -- one of the largest and most capable in the world. HPWREN enables a large volume of data to be moved off the mountain to each astronomer's home base. Modern digital technology with pipeline processing of the data produced enables astronomers to detect very faint moving and transient objects.

To find these objects, the telescope takes a relatively short exposure of a section of the sky. It then goes off and images a pre-arranged sequence of such target fields. After a period of time it comes back and repeats the sequence. Then it does it again after another interval. Any objects that are visible in all three images, but move consistently with respect to the background star field, are solar system objects such as asteroids, comets or Kuiper Belt objects. Because of the large amount of data, pipeline processing is used both to detect such objects and to calculate their preliminary orbits from the initial triplet data. Sedna and the tenth planet, 2003UB313, were found using this technique, as were a large number of Near Earth Asteroids, by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program.

The Nearby Supernova Factory piggybacks their hunt for a certain type of exploding star, known as Type Ia supernovae, with the data collected by the NEAT program, and they then use the observations of these supernovae as "standard candles" for measuring the accelerating expansion of the universe. To date the survey has discovered about 350 supernovae, including 90 Type Ia supernovae.

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