Microsoft founder Bill Gates gave a huge shot in the arm, $10M, for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to be built atop the Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile. What’s more, the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences doubled that gift, donating $20M. These gifts, announced January 3, 2008, bring the telescope closer to seeing its first light, scheduled in 2014.
An astronomers dream, the proposed ground-based telescope features three 8.4-meter mirrors to cover an unprecedented 10 square-degree field-of-view. A 3200 Megapixel camera will take in all the detail, producing a color “movie” of the universe with 30 Terabytes of data each night.
The LSST looks to answer, according to their spokespeople, some of the biggest questions of astronomy: “What is dark energy? What is dark matter? How did the Milky Way form?
What are the properties of small bodies in the solar system? Are there potentially hazardous asteroids that may impact the earth causing significant damage? What sort of new phenomena have yet to be discovered?”
The question of spotting a potentially hazardous asteroid in time to do anything about it is of real concern for NASA, with asteroid Apophis predicted to brush by close enough in 2029 to be seen anywhere on Earth with binoculars.
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