UW News

September 29, 2005

Telescope gets NSF funding

News and Information

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project in which the UW is a major participant, has received the first year of a four-year, $14.2 million award from the National Science Foundation to design and develop an 8.4-meter telescope scheduled for completion in 2012.

Zeljko Ivezic, a UW assistant professor of astronomy, is system scientist for the project and chairs the science council. He is the primary leader of scientific studies using the telescope, monitors the day-to-day scientific activity and works to ensure the consistency of the project’s scientific capability.

The NSF award will allow completion of design work so telescope construction can begin in 2009.

The telescope’s unique system for surveying the heavens is possible because of advances in several technologies, including large optics fabrication to create the distinctive three-mirror design; data management systems to process and catalog the 30 terabytes of data — the equivalent of 7,000 DVDs — generated each night, and new detectors needed to build the telescope’s 3 billion pixel digital camera, the largest ever built.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will image an area of the sky about 50 times that of the full moon every 15 seconds. That will allow movie-like monitoring of objects that change or move rapidly, such as supernova explosions visible halfway across the universe, nearby asteroids that could strike Earth, and faint objects far beyond Pluto in the outer solar system. Data collected will be available to the public and scientists around the world via the Internet.

A final site for the telescope has not been decided, but the choice has been narrowed to three possibilities — Las Campanas in Chile, Cerro Pachon in Chile and San Pedro Martir in Baja California, Mexico.

In 2003, the University of Arizona, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Research Corp. and the UW formed the LSST Corp., which is based in Tucson, Ariz.

Members added since include Brookhaven National Laboratory; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Johns Hopkins University; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; Stanford University; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.