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IMAGE: TACC s Ranch supercomputer, a long-term data mass storage system, is safely preserving over three petabytes of data from the Arecibo radio telescope. Ranch is an allocated resource of the Extreme. view more
Credit: TACC
Millions of people have seen footage of the famed Arecibo radio telescope s collapse in December 2020. What they would not have seen from those videos was Arecibo s data center, located outside the danger zone. It stores the golden copy of the telescope s data the original tapes, hard drives, and disk drives of sky scans since the 1960s.
Now, a new partnership will make sure that about three petabytes, or 3,000 terabytes, of telescope data is securely backed up off-site and made accessible to astronomers around the world, who will be able to use it to continue Arecibo Observatory s legacy of discovery and innovation.