University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and 22 partner institutions received a major $30 M gift to begin construction of the world’s most power telescope that will provide a yet unseen view of deep space.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project received $10 M from celebrated Microsoft founder Bill Gates and $20 M from the Charles Simonyi Fund for the Arts and Sciences. The donations will pay for the construction of the telescope’s three large mirrors, a five year process.
For the many Pittsburgh researchers that will be pulled into this endeavor, the project has the potential to make our region a premier research center in this field.
"What we hope is that Pittsburgh will become a research center for cosmology," says Jeffrey Newman, a nationally recognized expert on large survey astronomy and Pitt assistant professor. "Both Pitt and CMU will be hiring 2 people each in this field. It places us right at the forefront of physics and astronomy. We will be data experts for access to the LSST data."
The LSST will be the largest digital camera ever built, at 3 billion pixels, and will be perched on Cerro Pachón, a mountain in northern Chile where it will generate 30 trillion bytes of data per night. The detailed footage will provide a colorful, movie-like view of the cosmic activity and dark forces behind the universe’s expansion, making it the largest public database ever built.
Pitt joined the project in July 2007 and Carnegie Mellon University became a partner earlier this year. The two universities plan to work together with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Westinghouse Electric Company to contribute to managing the LSST. The Pittsburgh Google office has participated as well.
The LSST is a massive public-private venture that started in 2000 under the direction of the University of California at Davis. The telescope should be completed by 2014.
Writer: Deb Smit
Source: Jeffrey Newman, University of Pittsburgh