On Bill Gates, Open Data, Clean Water and Space Exploration

An intriguing story from the Guardian, On the roof of the Andes, Bill Gates helps to build ‘the world’s biggest digital camera’, immediately piqued my interest. It seems Gates and another Microsoft alumni, Charles Simonyi, are together funding the next stage of a project to build an extraordinary new telescope.

The sky seems too immense to absorb, even for giant telescopes. They focus on one tiny portion at a time, pinpricks in the cosmos, because traditionally astronomers like to dwell on detail.

Not any more. Cerro Pachon is to host the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a near $400m (£203m) project that will survey the entire sky several times a week – something never done before.

Every 15 seconds it will take an image seven times the diameter of the moon, adding up, every three days, to a full panorama of the heavens. Boasting 3,200 megapixels, it will be the world’s biggest digital camera.

This approach is very cool – astronomers will be able to focus on what is changing rather than what is relatively constant- one of the reasons the project gained initial funding was that it would allow mapping of celestial objects which might be on a collision course with Earth. But what really rocked me was the idea that the data will be open access. The Guardian reports Gates thusly:

“LSST is truly an internet telescope which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. It is a shared resource for all humanity – the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe.”

You gotta love the way Gates talks. But what’s really surprising is to hear him putting forward the open data argument. This is science, I guess, rather than commerce, in his eyes. The main reason this story talked directly to Greenmonk is simple: one of the reasons I started this blog was to agitate for open data in leading to better environmental outcomes: the trigger being that I had heard about some Gates Foundation primary research which was “killed” because it didn’t meet the Foundation’s strategic goals (the funding for Cerro Pachon is from Gates’ private fortune). The Foundation story was a rumour reported to me but it probably suited my prejudices about the Bill Gates modus operandi. He is not exactly known as an open source bigot… The observatory story however punctures some of these prejudices. I can only help that the Gates Foundation will also look to open and share its research data.

While we’re on the subject I would like to commend the Gates Foundationt for its $15m funding to help Bristol University create a clean water diagnostic tool which is easy to use as a pregnancy test.

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