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Mirror for UA telescope ready for polishing
The University of Arizona's Steward Mirror Lab has lifted the lid on its latest 8.4-meter mirror blank and pronounced it near-perfect - ready for a custom grinding and polishing job that will make it the most unusual telescope mirror ever built.
This single glass blank will actually become two mirrors, part of the novel three-mirror system of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. It will give astronomers the widest, deepest, most data-filled look at the night sky ever attempted.
When it is installed on a Chilean mountaintop in 2015, it will be capable of mapping the entire night sky in digital images every three days, gathering 15,000 gigabytes of information each night and making it available to astronomers worldwide for research.
University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel, who first proposed the project in a paper 10 years ago, said the telescope's usefulness is magnified by its wide field of view, the depth of itslight-gathering reach and the widespread dissemination of the images it will gather.
Astronomers looking for changes from image to image over time will be able to more easily spot potentially threatening near-Earth objects, exploding supernovae, comets and other phenomena.
It will also aid them in locating dark matter and energy by noting their effect on light from distant galaxies.
"It will provide vast amounts of new things," Angel said. Researchers, he said, "will be in the nice position of being able to pick and choose."
Grinding and polishing, during which about 16,000 pounds of glass will be removed from the mirror's surface, could take up to two years, said Jeffrey S. Kingsley, associate director of Steward Observatory.
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