Chuck DarwinThe #Lazuli #Space #Observatory is a project of #Schmidt #Sciences,
a philanthropic organization built by investor Wendy Schmidt and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
“This is the first full-scale observatory that is privately funded in space,” says Stuart Feldman, an astronomer, computer scientist and president of Schmidt Sciences,
who spoke to Scientific American before the announcement.
“For 20 years, Eric and I have pursued philanthropy to seek new frontiers,”
Wendy Schmidt said in a statement.
“With the #Schmidt #Observatory #System
[which includes Lazuli],
we’re enabling multiple approaches to understanding the vast universe
where we find ourselves stewards of a living planet.”
As envisioned, the telescope will boast a three-meter mirror
—larger than that of NASA’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope.
Its three instruments
—a planet-finding coronagraph,
a high-resolution wide-field camera
and a light-splitting spectrograph
—will study the atmospheres of distant worlds, dissect the light from exploding stars and tackle mysteries such as the nature of dark energy, the enigmatic force that drives the universe’s accelerating expansion.
Lazuli will be agile as well;
it will be able to rapidly swivel to stare at things that go bump in the cosmic night.
With a price tag rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the telescope could launch before the decade is out.
And if it is successful, the feat could signal a new way to achieve big things in the space sciences.
“There’s a lot of good potential here,
and it’s encouraging to see these new pathways opening for doing astrophysics,”
says astronomer Heidi Hammel,
vice president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.
Lazuli is just one of several large projects comprising the Schmidt Observatory System
—initiatives that Feldman characterizes as
“risky but exciting.”
The others are all ground-based and share a common design element in that they’re modular,
using hundreds of small and relatively low-cost components to create much larger and more capable arrays.
One, the
#Deep #Synoptic #Array, will study the sky at radio wavelengths,
while its counterpart,
the #Argus #Array, will observe in visible light.
A third smaller-but-scalable
#Large #Fiber #Array #Spectroscopic #Telescope
will gather spectra of cosmic targets such as exoplanets and supernovae.
The goal, Feldman says, is for each of these projects to be doing science by 2029.
https://www.schmidtsciences.org/focus-area-astrophysics/
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