Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Receives $14.2 Million from NSF

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) announced September 1 that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the first year of a four-year, $14.2 million award to design and develop a large telescope that will be used to survey the night sky. The LSST will take 10-second exposures of 10-square-degree sections of the sky every three nights, allowing repeated, time-lapse images or movies of objects that change or move on rapid timescales, such as exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. The LSST will also be used to trace the apparent distortions in the shapes of remote galaxies produced by lumps of Dark Matter. The LASS website contains a large section explaining the science behind the experiment. The data will be made openly available to the public and scientists from around the world and accessible by a web browser. The final site for the LSST has not been decided. The three candidate locations are Las Campanas, Chile, Cerro Pachon, Chile, or San Pedro Martir, Baja California, Mexico. An artist's rendition of the telescope is shown here with a 6-foot tall person drawn in red to show the relative scale.