Can Big Astronomy be agile and cost-effective?
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and his wife Wendy are betting on the yes.
Schmidt Sciences, part of the Schmidts’ philanthropic efforts, is funding the construction of four major new telescopes, including one for orbit, that will rival the capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
And the organization aims to have all four telescopes operational within four years, a sprint compared to the decade or more it often takes world-class astronomical facilities.
“This is an experiment to accelerate the discovery of astrophysics,” Arpita Roy, director of the Institute for Astrophysics and Space at Schmidt Sciences, said Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix.
The projects largely leverage already available technologies, particularly the high-performance computer chips that have enabled advances in artificial intelligence, and remix them in innovative, forward-thinking ways to bring new capabilities to astronomers.
“We are accepting a lot more risk,” Dr. Roy said. But she described this additional risk as “calibrated and considered”.
Schmidt Sciences has been quietly funding preliminary design studies, technology development and prototypes for several years.
The organization is now unveiling its overall plan. Agreements with universities that will manage the ground systems are in place and manufacturing of telescope components has begun.
“We are able to say that these things are underway,” said Stuart Feldman, president of Schmidt Sciences.
In addition to the space telescope, named Lazuli, the other projects are the Argus Array, which will continuously photograph the entire night sky in the northern hemisphere; the Deep Synoptic Array, or DSA, which will scan cosmic radio frequencies; and the Large Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope, or LFAST, which will collect light of specific colors from distant stars, planets and galaxies.
All four fall under one umbrella name: the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System.
While federal investments have been the primary funding for science in the United States for decades, astronomy has long benefited from the benevolence of wealthy patrons like Percival Lowell, who funded the Lowell Observatory in Arizona so he could study what he thought were canals and other signs of an alien civilization on Mars.
But Schmidt Sciences’ projects are different, following a more Silicon Valley mindset: faster and cheaper, with targeted and limited objectives. Parts of the Schmidt Observatory System are intended to remain in scientific service for a few years, not decades.
If the Schmidt telescopes could last longer, the idea is that they could also be replaced by new observatories taking advantage of ever-improving technologies. This could still be less costly than the traditional approach.
“We think we should run these experiments for defined useful lives and then move on to the next exciting step,” Dr. Roy said. “The lifespans we are now committed to are three to five years. »
Schmidt Sciences officials acknowledged scientific turmoil over the past year as the Trump administration sought to slash the budget of NASA and the National Science Foundation. But they said they want to complement, not replace, federal science efforts.
NASA and NSF “have been very good at very long-term, incredible, 10- or 20-year instruments and missions, and they can’t be beat,” Dr. Feldman said in an interview. “Since we have a simple funding model – we either do it or we don’t, and the Schmidts choose to give us the appropriate amount or not – we can say: let’s accelerate these projects. »
He said the Schmidts didn’t want to disclose exactly how much they were spending. “Lazuli is worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” Dr. Feldman said. “Ground-based telescopes aren’t cheap either.”
Lazuli is particularly ambitious.
At the astronomy meeting, Dr. Feldman said the space telescope would have a slightly larger mirror than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
But it had to be even bigger: Dr. Feldman said a 20-foot-diameter mirror had been made for the space telescope, which would make it more than twice as wide as Hubble’s. But this mirror is made of a single piece of glass, and there is only one rocket capable of sending it into orbit: Starship, currently under development by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Because Starship development has been bumpier and slower than Mr. Musk had promised, Schmidt Sciences pivoted to fall 2024.
“Spacecraft schedules are malleable,” Dr. Feldman said. “We will come back to this in the future.”
The project grew out of discussions between Dr. Feldman and Saul Perlmutter, a Berkeley astrophysicist who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up instead of slowing down as expected. One way or another, “dark energy” is splitting the universe.
Lazuli will be better able to measure the colors of exploding white dwarf stars. The shift in emission wavelengths toward the redder part of the spectrum indicates how quickly distant galaxies are moving away.
More recent observations indicate that white dwarf supernovas are not all exactly the same and that the nature of dark energy has changed over time. Lazuli could provide the data needed to help unravel the mystery.
“This allows us to start to understand what’s going on,” Dr. Perlmutter said. “Is there truly new physics? It seems likely.”
The spacecraft is also capable of rotating in space faster than Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope, allowing it to measure newly discovered supernovas as they reach their peak brightness.
Lazuli will also be able to study planets around other stars, using a coronagraph to block the stars’ glare.
One of the planned ground-based telescopes, the Argus Array, closely resembles the Northern Hemisphere’s version of the new Vera Rubin Observatory, largely funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. This telescope, located on top of a mountain in Chile, will scan the southern hemisphere sky every few days.
But Argus is very different. Instead of one large telescope with a 27.6-foot-wide primary mirror, Argus will be made up of 1,200 small telescopes, each with an 11-inch mirror. Nicholas Law, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of North Carolina who oversees Argus, said the network aims to cover different astronomical objectives.
Small telescopes won’t easily spot fast-moving objects like asteroids and they aren’t designed to look that far. But they will scan the entire sky faster, in just a few minutes.
The 1,200 telescopes are arranged atop eight circular mounts that move in unison. This design does not include a traditional protective telescope dome, but is instead housed in what looks like a warehouse with skylights – a simpler and less expensive structure.
Because it continually covers the entire sky, it can instantly track when another instrument makes a discovery. For example, if LIGO – the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory – detects the space-time jitter caused by a black hole collision somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere sky, Argus will be able to see if there is a visual counterpart to the event.
Because it will save all data collected over the previous week, astronomers will be able to go back to see if there were signs that something was happening before LIGO detected gravitational waves.
“It can act almost like a time machine,” Dr. Law said.
The network’s location has not yet been announced, although Dr. Law said it would likely be in Texas. He said he hoped the project would get first light in 2027. (Alex Gerko, a Russian-born British billionaire and financial trader, is co-financing the project with Schmidt Sciences.)
The Deep Synoptic Array and LFAST also take the approach of using many small telescopes to act as one large instrument.
DSA monitors the sky like the Rubin Observatory, but at radio wavelengths rather than visible light. It will feature 1,650 satellite dishes, each 20 feet wide, spread across 60,000 acres in Nevada.
“This is unprecedented compared to any telescope currently being considered or in the future,” said Gregg Hallinan, a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, which will build and manage the DSA. “Every radio telescope ever built in the last century has found about 10 million radio sources. We will double that number in the first 24 hours.”
During the five-year survey, a billion radio sources are expected to be found in the universe, Dr. Hallinan said. Work could begin next year, he said.
LFAST will be made up of many optical telescopes, but its main purpose will be to measure spectra or colors, not to take photographs. This color information is key to understanding brief events, such as supernovas, and to identifying the contents of planets’ atmospheres around other stars. But measuring spectra takes time.
“You have to collect enough photons because you’re scattering them,” said Chad Bender, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who is responsible for LFAST.
Dr Bender said astronomers want to collect many more spectra, but current telescopes don’t have enough time.
Since many smaller telescopes are cheaper than a large one, the hope is that LFAST will provide this capability at a lower cost.
The Arizona team is currently building a prototype to test, and depending on how it works, the design may be modified and expanded.
About 150 people gathered to watch the presentation in Phoenix, and others watched it online. The astronomers seemed to like what they heard. Heidi Hammel of the Association of Universities for Astronomical Research said she was excited that Schmidt Sciences was trying something new.
“Time will tell if they succeed,” she said. “If they can, as they said, create new paradigms, that’s great.”
The new telescopes will not surpass the most ambitious programs like NASA’s Webb telescope or the Habitable Worlds Observatory project.
“They are proposing alternatives that pursue very specific and clear scientific objectives,” Dr. Hammel said. “It’s exciting.”
