Robots are speeding up the most boring job in astronomy
Share Hundreds of fibers, arranged by hand, capture light at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s New Mexico telescope. DAN LONG/APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY Astronomy surveys aim to up the pace with army of tiny robots Feb. 3, 2021 , 3:25 PM It was one of the stranger and more monotonous jobs in astronomy: plugging optical fibers into hundreds of holes in aluminum plates. Every day, technicians with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) prepped up to 10 plates that would be placed that night at the focus of the survey’s telescopes in Chile and New Mexico. The holes matched the exact position...
Source: sciencemag.org