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S.G. Djorgovski (Caltech)
The vast amounts of information from large digital sky surveys and archives, now measured in Terabytes, and soon in Petabytes, functionally unified within the NVO, will enable and stimulate a completely new way of doing astronomy. While some of these new opportunities exist even with the individual large sky surveys (e.g., SDSS, 2MASS, DPOSS, etc.), their federation within the NVO, spanning a broad range of wavelengths, provides an added scientific value, and opens an unprecedented panchromatic view of the universe. Several types of new science can be contemplated, including the following: (1) Precision statistical astronomy, including, e.g., studies of the large-scale structure in the universe, or the structure of our Galaxy, which are no longer Poisson noise limited due to the large numbers of sources and the systematic sky coverage. (2) Searches for rare, exotic, or even previously unknown types of astronomical objects, including complete samples of quasars, brown dwarfs, stars or galaxies of a given type, etc. (3) Systematic exploration of heretofore poorly sampled portions of the observable parameter space, e.g., the low surface brightness universe, or the time/variability domain at faint flux levels, at any wavelength. (4) The panchromatic nature of the unified NVO data sets can open new, relatively unbiased views of important astrophysical processes and populations, e.g., star formation or AGN, regardless of the obscuration, etc. Such grand studies are simply not feasible with the isolated, smaller data sets available in the past. Finally, a careful, systematic selection of targets from large sky surveys for focused follow-up studies using large telescopes and space observatories would make an optimal use of the valuable observing time at such costly facilities. Perhaps most important would be the enabling role of the NVO in making these information-rich data sets and tools to explore them available to the broad community, regardless of their access to large telescopes: major new discoveries can be made in data mining of the digital sky.