A mountain peak in Chile has been chosen as home for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a Tucson-based project that will be able to scan the entire visible sky every three nights.
The world's most powerful survey telescope, the LSST will join the existing Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, on Cerro Pachón, an 8,800-foot peak in northern Chile.
The LSST project, led by a Tucson-headquartered consortium formed by the University of Arizona, Research Corp., the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the University of Washington, should be under construction by 2009, with a completion date in 2012.
The 8.4-meter telescope will be 50 times as powerful as any survey telescope, with the capability to image the entire visible sky in just days, instead of years as current scopes can, said Donald Sweeney, LSST project manager.
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"Things change every night up in the universe and we're hoping to catch a lot of those," Sweeney said. "Every night, stars explode and we don't have an ability to cover things that quickly."
The LSST will be able to map the visible sky rapidly and continuously, providing a new way to observe the universe. The observations will focus on astronomy and fundamental physics, including studies in dark energy and dark matter to understand why the universe is expanding, Sweeney said.
The Cerro Pachón site was selected after a two-year study of atmospheric conditions and quality of astronomical "seeing" at four sites in Chile, Mexico and the Canary Islands. The existing observatory will provide the necessary infrastructure and access to fiber-optic links the LSST will need.
The telescope will produce 30 terabytes, or 30,000 gigabytes, of data a night, enough to fill the memory of several hundred personal computers. The streaming data becoming available to the public immediately, Sweeney said.
"I call it the National Public Radio of astronomy," Sweeney said. "We don't hold data for a proprietary period; it's available to everyone, from a high school student to a sophisticated astronomer doing research."
The project has received a three-year, $14.2 million federal grant to design and develop the scope and has raised $25 million in private donations.
With the final site selected, the LSST team is in a better position to write a major proposal for $200 million in federal funds to build and operate the telescope, Sweeney said.
"Knowing the site lets us do very specific geological studies and do architectural drawings to have a much stronger proposal," he said. The construction money will need to come from a congressional appropriation.
The LSST Corp. was formed in 2003 and has grown from four members to 15.
