.....
“This instrument should open the time window,” Tyson said. “LSST goes so
faint, so fast, that it should be able to detect things like optical
flashes or [gamma ray bursters] from the edge of the universe.”
The telescope should collect about 5 terabytes of sky data per
day of operation.
The Hubble Space Telescope, in comparison, produces about 1 terabyte
each year, which is also equivalent to 231 million pages of typed text.
After 10 years, LSST is expected to have accumulated 15 to 20 petabytes
or data, where one petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.
To manage the data flood, project researchers plan to dump the
images and information into a database to be mined by individual
astronomers searching for observations of specific objects.
“I think we’re starting to understand that a lot of the important
problems in astronomy we need to establish huge databases like this,”
said Sidney Wolff, an LSST board member. Wolff also heads the National
Optical Astronomy Observatory’s contribution to LSST’s design.
.....

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I read this article from MSNBC news. Sorry to post it here.
Does anyone know if they use commercial database software products?
Regards,
Fan Ruoxin