Microsoft vs Google Space Race. Place Your Bets Now!
Are Microsoft and Google in a space race? We think they are. Their rivalry is also, we believe, a precursor to the next great post-Internet technology boom: space exploration and development.
Microsoft released its new Worldwide Telescope this spring, which will access images from NASA’s great fleet of space-born telescopes and earth-bound observatories such as the future Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, partially funded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, which is projected for ‘first light’ in 2014 in Chile’s Atacama Desert -the world’s Southern Hemisphere space-observatory mecca. The 8.4-meter telescope will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3-billion pixel digital camera. The telescope will probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and it will open a movie-like window on objects that change or move rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids and distant Kuiper Belt objects.
LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to Read More