The Large-Aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the changing universe from exploding stars to earth-threatening asteroids.

Every week, the Large-aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), whose 6.5-meter mirror has been shaped to provide a much wider field of vision than that of other telescopes, will survey the entire sky, producing an almost real-time movie of the night sky.

These surveys will be produced in digitized format and distributed immediately to astronomers and the public over the Web. They will yield a wealth of data that will open our eyes in new ways to cosmic objects that vary in brightness on time scales of days, weeks, months, or years, and range in distance all the way from the outer reaches of the visible universe down to the dangerously close. LSST will discover approximately 100,000 supernovas each year, located in galaxies many millions or even billions of light-years from the Milky Way, some of which can be studied in detail with the GSMT. Another benefit of LSST's deep-space survey will accrue from its ability to find places in the night sky where a massive object happens to lie almost directly between Earth and a still more distant object. Under these circumstances, the massive object magnifies the light from the more distant object by bending nearby space. LSST's measurements of these magnification effects will allow us to map the distribution of dark matter in space. This map will test, on the largest attainable distance scales, evidence of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, theorized to be due to the presence of so-called dark energy. Much closer to Earth, LSST will find 90 percent of all the near-Earth objects-asteroids moving on orbits that pass close to our own-with diameters that exceed 300 meters. Each of these asteroids represents a potential threat worth identifying and assessing,since a collision of such an asteroid with our planet could produce localized, if not planet-wide, disaster.

LSST will also study comets and their close cousins,the members of the Kuiper Belt. Most of the comets that we see probably originate in the Kuiper Belt, a collection of minor planets orbiting beyond Neptune. The Kuiper Belt is the remnant of the protoplanetary disk of material that once orbited the Sun and produced the planets and their large satellites nearly 5 billion years ago. These remnants incorporate the nearly pristine record of the composition and dynamics of the Sun's protoplanetary disk. Astronomers have now discovered more than 500 separate objects in the Kuiper Belt,most with diameters between 100 and 800 kilometers. Deeper surveys made with the LSST should reveal many more of these objects, which are believed to number nearly 100,000, with diameters larger than 100 kilometers. Astronomers suspect that among them may be perhaps as many as 10 objects as large as Pluto (2,000 kilometers across), but several times farther from the Sun.

LSST should generate the largest nonproprietary database and data- mining system in the world, adding the dimension of time to the three spatial dimensions in our knowledge of the cosmos. The classification, analysis, and distribution of an anticipated trillion bits of data collected each day represent an enormous challenge.

Visit the Official LSST Site

The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) Will Provide User-Friendly Access To The Nation's Large Astronomica Databases

The National Virtual Observatory (NVO), the highest priority among the recommended small initiatives, will link all major space-and ground-based astronomical data banks into a virtual Web-based system. The NVO is intended for users from grade-school children to professional astronomers, and it will allow automated searches among all the objects and the wide range of wavelengths contained in the vast array of observations made by LSST and other planned and currently operational facilities. Collaborations with international partners should lead to a future global virtual observatory.

Visit the Official NVO Site

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