Cerro Pachón, in northern Chile, beat out Mexico’s San Pedro Mártir as the favored site for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, project leaders announced in May. If construction proceeds on schedule, ground will be broken in 2009 for the 8.4-meter LSST and first light will be in 2012.
The LSST “goes wide, fast, and deep,” says project director Anthony Tyson of the University of California, Davis. The telescope will scan the entire visible sky every three nights, detecting objects that change or move, such as supernovae, near-Earth asteroids down to 100 meters in diameter, and Kuiper belt objects. Other key areas of study will be dark matter and dark energy. For such studies, Tyson says, “you’d like to have knowledge of the Hubble constant as a function of redshift and of how dark matter is clumped over cosmic time. LSST has multiple probes of both.”
What makes the LSST unique,...
