Frossie Economou

Technical Manager for Data Management, Vera C. Rubin Observatory

Frossie Economou is the Project Manager for the Rubin Observatory Science Platform. An astronomer by training, she has led software teams in a number of different observatories building open source systems for data processing, observation management and data archive services for telescope data. Her team at Rubin is responsible for building science platform services, DevOps engineering and the observatory telemetry database based in InfluxDB. She is based in Tucson, Arizona.

How InfluxDB Helps Vera C. Rubin Observatory Make the Deepest, Widest Image of the Universe

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, under construction in Chile, is an ambitious project that will embark on an unprecedented astronomical survey of the sky scheduled to start in 2022. It will collect 500 petabytes of image data by mapping the sky continuously for ten years and broadcast alerts for objects that change in position or brightness every night. The science derived from the data will help astronomers worldwide to address some of the most pressing questions about the structure and evolution of the universe and perhaps even uncover the secrets of Dark Energy. In addition to astronomical data, Rubin Observatory also needs to record data from numerous hardware devices and sensors in order to monitor the observatory and its advanced instrumentation. With high frequency input from a multitude of sources, needed is an extremely robust and flexible system to accommodate data streams that vary widely in context and throughput. This talk will give an overview of Rubin Observatory’s mission, describe its Engineering and Facilities Database and show how technologies like Kafka and InfluxDB give scientists, engineers, and technicians the tools they need to analyze telemetry data in real time.

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