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Mercury, March/April 2003 Table of Contents

by James C. White II

The National Virtual Observatory will revolutionize astronomy by providing unparalleled access to data.

The nature of astronomical investigation is about to change. Don't fret the loss of the romantic elements of astronomy, such as people spending long hours in observatory control rooms. Rather, embrace the new tools and resources available from the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), the embodiment of a new paradigm in observational and theoretical astronomy.

Two broad conditions are driving the development of this nontraditional observatory: a smothering wealth of digital informational and profound advances in computing technology. Data streaming from space-based observatories and from ground-based surveys threaten to overwhelm the astronomy community. We must have mechanisms in place for archiving these data and for routinely culling information pertinent to a given investigation. With more powerful computers, sophisticated algorithms, inexpensive data storage, and fast networks, we are ready to pioneer a new way of interrogating the heavens.

The National Science Foundation has committed $10 million to develop the NVO. Principal investigators Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins University and Roy Williams of Caltech lead a team of astronomers and computer scientists spread around the United States at roughly 20 institutions. The precise nature of the NVO will be determined by the scientific desires and technological realities of the age, but the "Observatory" is already a full year into its anticipated 5-year construction and implementation stage. By most accounts, it's ahead of schedule.

The NVO is not really an "observatory" per se in that there will no new telescopes, and it's not "virtual" in the sense that all data will be genuine. Instead, the NVO will be a structure that combines enormous amounts of observational data into a standardized, minable data archive covering all wavebands, all sampled resolutions, and the entire sky. The data will come from large, international, multiwavelength surveys such as 2MASS and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and smaller, more directed surveys such as the Digitized Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.

Even the manner in which astronomers handle and store data will be different for the NVO. If you accumulate a few trillion bytes of data from a survey, just store it on your own machines — the NVO will connect the astronomers who wish to use those data to the data itself. Imagine the NVO as a grand nexus that will link huge data sets, tools for mining those data sets, and users of all levels. Indeed, this new paradigm is being assembled with an egalitarian emphasis on education and public outreach. From the beginning, the NVO will stand ready for use by anyone — from a 6th-grade teacher to a high-energy astrophysicist.

This mock-up of the NVO multispectral image viewer shows the power of the virtual observatory. Users will be able to locate and retrieve images of the galaxy M87 from data archives around the world and display them in a single view. The NVO will construct a spectral energy distribution to show the brightness of M87 in different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Courtesy of the Space Telescope Science Institute Audio-Visual Laboratory.