LSST astronomy project awarded $30 million from Charles Simonyi, Bill Gates (1/4/2008)

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project will announce today, Jan. 3, its receipt of two major gifts: $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "The LSST is an extremely ambitious project that will have enormous impact on a wide range of scientific questions," said Niel Brandt, Penn State professor of astronomy and the leader of the LSST ActiveGalaxy/Quasar team. "We are quite excited about the multitude of research opportunities -- ranging from potential killer asteroids in our solar system to the most distant objects in the universe -- that will be available for Penn State scientists."

Penn State has been a member of the LSST project since fall 2005, and Brandt and other members of the Penn State Department of Astronomy are active in the development of the project's planned survey of the universe. Donald Schneider, professor of astronomy, who also is Penn State's representative to the LSST board of directors, remarked, "Arthur Clark once said that the dinosaurs became extinct because they did not have a space program. LSST may allow us, for the first time, to be able to identify most, if not all, of the solar-system objects that pose a danger of a catastrophic impact with Earth."

Expected to see its "first light" in 2014, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3 billion-pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move.

The LSST is a public-private partnership that has been under development since 2000. The new gift enables the construction of LSST's three large mirrors, which are expected to take more than five years to manufacture. The first stages of production for the two largest mirrors are now beginning at the Mirror Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Ariz. Other key elements of the LSST system also will be aided by the gift.

"This support from Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates will lead to a transformation in the way we study the universe," said LSST director J. Anthony Tyson. "By mapping the visible sky deeply and rapidly, the LSST will let everyone experience a novel view of our universe and permit exciting new questions in a variety of areas of astronomy and fundamental physics."

The LSST will be constructed on Cerro Pachon, a mountain in northern Chile. Its design of three large mirrors and three refractive lenses in a camera leads to a 10 square degree field-of-view with excellent image quality. The telescope's 3,200-megapixel camera will be the largest digital camera ever constructed. Over 10 years of operations, about 2,000 deep exposures will be acquired for every part of the sky over 20,000 square degrees. This color "movie" of the universe will open an entirely new window: the time domain. LSST will produce 30 terabytes of data per night, yielding a total database of 150 petabytes. Dedicated data facilities will process the data in real time.

"What a shock it was when Galileo saw in his telescope the phases of Venus, or the moons of Jupiter, the first hints of a dynamic universe," Simonyi said. "Today, by building a special telescope-computer complex, we can study this dynamism in unprecedented detail. LSST will produce a database suitable for answering a wide range of pressing questions: 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?"

"LSST is just as imaginative in its technology and approach as it is with its science mission," Gates said. "LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. Astronomical research with LSST becomes a software issue -- writing code and database queries to mine the night sky and recover its secrets. The 8.4-meter LSST telescope and the three-gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity -- the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe. It is fun for Charles and me to be a team again supporting this work, given all we have done together on software projects."

LSST is designed to be a public facility -- the database and resulting catalogs will be made available to the community at large with no proprietary restrictions. A sophisticated data-management system will provide easy access, enabling simple queries from individual users (both professionals and amateurs), as well as computationally intensive scientific investigations that utilize the entire database.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Penn State University

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