In a so very philanthropic move, Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates of Intentional Software and Microsoft Inc., respectively, have agreed to a donation of a $30 million for a cosmic reason. They have made this generous donation for the development of Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (L.S.S.T.). This large telescope would be set on a mountaintop in Chile.
The project will probably take almost 5 years to be accomplished. Perched on Cerro Pachon in northern Chile, this telescope will provide large real time data by surveying the entire sky in its reach every third night. It will give the details of every single move by the planets or stars or even asteroids. This will enable the astronomers to study the cosmic changes with ease.
Being developed by Davis who is right now leading a team of developers from over 22 universities and research institutions like Google, this telescope loaded with a 3 billion pixel detector, will be of 330 inches in diameter. It will provide around 30 TB of data per night basis. With the help of research grants of about $389 million from National Science Foundation, this telescope will be developed at Mirror Laboratory, University of Arizona.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be essential to study dark matter and any mysterious movements in dark energy can be mapped. This will provide the astronomers to do advanced research on astrophysics.
Source: NY Times
