The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has announced a three-year agreement with Google to host data from astronomy observations in the cloud.
Rubin and Google said that the collaboration, made public Dec. 9, would bring in a new generation of “large-scale scientific computing” projects that can be shared worldwide with Internet services.
Google will host Rubin’s Interim Data Facility (IDF) that will collect preliminary data until the observatory becomes fully operational in 2023. The data will eventually be available to hundreds of scientists ahead of the prime observing phase of Rubin, known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST. (The observatory itself was previously called LSST, short for “Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,” before it was renamed earlier this year.)
