Wasabi Becomes Founding Corporate Philanthropic Partner of the LSST Corporation

At its core, Wasabi’s is a business model built on a future that teems with data. From online security to media and entertainment, to scientific research, Wasabi’s bet is that the Bottomless Cloud will redefine the tenets of success in the 21st Century by changing the way we view data, from being a byproduct of business to a foundational driver of radically new businesses.

That’s why aligning with a data-intensive, visionary project with the goal of no less than unlocking the secrets of the universe makes perfect sense to us here at Wasabi. I am very proud to support these visionary plans with the announcement that we have become the first, founding, Corporate Philanthropic Partner of the LSST Corporation in its mission to change the face of astrophysics.

For those of you unfamiliar with the wonderful world of astronomy, LSST holds the potential to revolutionize our understanding of some of the deepest mysteries of the Universe. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is a planned 10-year survey of the southern sky that will take place at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction on the El Penon peak of Cerro Pachon in northern Chile. The telescope will include the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy, which will be mounted on the Simonyi Survey Telescope. During the first 10 years of operations, the telescope will survey the entire southern sky and provide the widest, fastest and deepest views of the night sky ever observed. Discoveries that are expected include finding supernovae in real-time, follow-up imaging of gravitational wave events, and the cataloging of the solar system's billion-plus objects (comets, asteroids, etc.).

The concept behind the Rubin Observatory Project is remarkably simple: conduct a deep survey over an enormous area of sky; do it with a frequency that enables images of every part of the visible sky to be obtained every few nights, and continue in this mode for 10 years to achieve astronomical catalogs thousands of times larger than ever previously compiled – the first time a telescope will catalog more galaxies than there are people on Earth.

In support of the incredible scope of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, the LSST Corporation is committed to training a new generation of young scientists and researchers and preparing the scientific community for the challenges that Rubin Observatory LSST will bring. To keep up with LSST’s vast and complex data stream, astronomers must build strong research collaborations with concrete plans and strategies, train researchers to use modern data science Wasabi’s involvement will include a grant for science research plus direct support of the LSSTC. This vast public archive of data will dramatically advance our knowledge of the dark energy and dark matter that make up 95 percent of the universe, as well as galaxy formation and potentially hazardous asteroids. How incredible!

Data is the single most important differentiator in how organizations innovate, gain insight into their fields, and increasingly, how we understand the universe around us and our place in it. Just as the universe is infinite, Wasabi is and will be an integral part of our present and future, storing the universe’s bottomless data.