The famous astronomer Carl Sagan was the one who, in his television program ‘Cosmos’, pronounced the famous phrase that “the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of planet Earth”. A statement that is hard for us to believe, but that science has proven: space would contain some 300 trillion stars spread over some 100,000 galaxies. Ours alone, the Milky Way, contains between 200,000 and 400,000 stars. If you have been dizzy with these figures, imagine the astronomers who try to search for answers among them daily. Fortunately, the new computer tools are good allies and simplify this arduous task.
An example of this symbiosis between science and technology is the Gaia mission: run by the European Space Agency (ESA), this project has been analyzing the Milky Way since 2013, generating the most complete map of our galaxy to date. To date, he has ‘hunted’ some 2 billion objects with which he can create the rest of the ‘photography’. “You can only see one percent of all the stars in the Milky Way – Rubén Álvarez Timón, director of Information Technology at ESA – explains to ABC, but this data is extrapolated to create the complete 3D map.”
Each day, it locks onto 70 million stars, producing 10,000 times more data than previous missions. And the mission has been extended to 2025, so the information just keeps going and growing. To handle it, the ESA is counting on the company NetApp, who offers it the support and the platform not only to guard this huge amount of data, but also who guarantees access for the entire scientific community, who can “dive” among all of them and know from the composition, temperature, mass and age of the stars, to the speed at which they move away from or approach us.
“ESA cannot use the data as it arrives from the spacecraft, but it must be transformed and taken to an accessible platform, available to any scientist who requires this information,” Jaime Balañá, technical director of NetApp for Latin America, told ABC. . “Think about when you move a lot of photos and videos: sometimes it is complicated and it can take a long time; Well, imagine if we talk not about megabytes, but about terabytes (one million megabytes). Solving those kinds of problems is our job.”
It is not the only collaboration carried out by these two entities. ESA is the space agency with the most powerful Earth observation program: Copernicus. It is designed to provide accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible information to improve environmental management, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change, and ensure citizen security. For example, it was used to better understand disasters such as the La Palma volcano or the recent earthquakes in Turkey. It also monitors the flow of rivers or the melting of the poles.
In addition, they also manage the ESA scientific archives portal, in which the huge amounts of scientific data obtained in three decades of space missions are stored and which can be freely accessed online by the world scientific community and, in general, by any interested person. . The portal receives some 18,000 visits each month. Containing petabytes of data, this portal represents a “library of the universe” as a free and expert resource, helping scientists shed light and find answers to the mysteries of the universe.
“Our community, the world’s scientists, need to be able to access the data contained in our scientific archives quickly and easily, and to be able to derive maximum value from that data. These experts rely on our archives for their scientific research, discoveries, and publication of scientific articles. This is a great example of how technology and science, working together, have been able to create our wonderful digital library of the universe”, concludes Álvarez Timón.