UCI Joins Sky Survey

School to help develop powerful telescope in Chile.

The Orange County Register

August 23, 2006

By Gary Robbins

UC Irvine is joining the group of elite research institutions developing the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a proposed instrument powerful and versatile enough to study everything from near-Earth asteroids to dark energy, which is thought to make up 70 percent of the universe.

UCI's Center for Cosmology successfully petitioned to become a member of the LSST Corp., the public-private partnership that plans to start building the 8.4-meter telescope in northern Chile as early as 2010.

The National Science Foundation gave the corporation almost $15 million for design and development. But the telescope's overall price is expected to exceed $290 million, some of which would be private money.

Eight UCI scholars will work with Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and other corporation partners to develop LSST, whose unusually wide field of view will enable it to survey southern hemisphere skies in just three days. The telescope will record 30 terrabytes of data per night – enough to fill 7,000 DVDs.

"This is a high-priority instrument that potentially could have a huge impact," said David Kirkby, the UCI particle physicist who is overseeing the Center for Cosmology's participation in the project

Irvine's contributions might include helping to develop the telescope's main digital camera, an instrument that alone could cost $100 million. The primary mirror for the telescope will be roughly 27 feet, the size of an average Winnebago.

The LSST Corp.'s Web site says its telescope "will be able to survey the entire visible sky every three nights with its three-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 on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids as small as 100 meters, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects."