OVERVIEW
Astronomy is among the fields of scientific endeavor that have recently begun to generate data on a massive scale. A prime example of this data-intensive astronomy is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LSST. Bearing a 3 gigapixel digital camera, the LSST is planned to output 30TB nightly. And, even sooner than the LSST, within a few months the Solar Dynamics Observatory will be launched. As its name implies, the SDO will bear instruments to observe the sun, very powerful instruments which will output up to 2TB of data a day.
Over this past summer, I interned at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. The LMSAL group is greatly involved with the SDO project. As I am a student focusing on software development, Neal Hurlburt, my supervisor, pointed me to a project involving the use of software systems to bring some order and structure to this avalanche of solar data. For my SOS project, I propose to continue working on this system.
IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
The specific idea for my software system is an automatic inferencing system for solar data. LMSAL has a database of solar events, the Heliophysics Event Registry, in which events such as sun flares and sun spots are cataloged by a human or software agent. The HER can be queried via the Internet, bringing annotated solar data to any interested physicist. The present search system will only output data that is in a specific search parameter. A much more powerful system would be one that can make inferences from the user’s search, and present events that are somehow related, whether in time, place, or some other quality.
PERSONAL INTEREST
For me, the main interest of this project is that it combines programming with astronomy. These are two of my great academic loves. In addition, this project will allow me to work with “knowledge,” rather than solely “data”-based computing.
*database
*knowledgebase
*metadata
*ontologies
*Web 2.0
*internet
*XML
*inference
