SkyMapper, Australia’s first new optical research telescope for 25 years, and the first to conduct a comprehensive digital map survey of the southern skies, was officially launched today at the Siding Spring Observatory facility of The Australian National University.
The $13 million telescope was launched by Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Senator the Hon Kim Carr at Mount Stromlo Observatory and by NSW Governor Professor Marie Bashir AC at the telescope’s base of Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, NSW.
SkyMapper is a state of the art telescope which has been custom built to undertake the Southern Sky Survey – the first ever systematic digital map of the southern skies. Over the next five years the telescope will take detailed pictures of the entirety of the southern sky. In the process it will produce 400 Terabytes of data – equivalent to 100,000 DVDs – and that data set will be freely available to astronomers via the Internet.
“This is a great day for Australian astronomy,” said ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb. “SkyMapper is the first new research grade optical telescope in Australia since 1984. It will perform a task never before undertaken by mapping our skies and the data produced will benefit researchers around the world and help us to answer essential questions about the universe around us.
“SkyMapper shows the university’s continuing commitment to being at the forefront of world-leading research, and reflects the Federal Government’s commitment to ensuring that Australian science is exploring the knowledge frontier.”
“Astronomers at Stromlo, across Australia, and the rest of the world will use this data to discover everything from dwarf planets like Pluto in our solar system, to the first Black holes in the Universe, whose light has taken 13 Billion years to reach us”, said Professor Brian Schmidt, the project’s lead scientist.
The project began in 2002 when the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics applied for a grant from the Australian Research Council to do a modest survey of the southern skies using the Great Melbourne Telescope (GMT) at Mount Stromlo. But just 18 days after the grant was awarded the GMT was destroyed in the Canberra bushfires. The SkyMapper project grew from that as part of Mt Stromlo’s rebirth from the ashes.
“The telescope has been a real Australian project, with Australian company, Electro Optics Pty Ltd, taking on the challenge of building this new breed of telescope, and over twenty engineers and young scientists at ANU combining to help build Australia’s largest and most sensitive digital camera,” said Professor Schmidt. “The camera, a 268 Megapixel behemoth, sits behind the telescope and is capable of snapping pictures covering an area of sky 25 times larger than the full moon, with a sensitivity 5 million times more than the human eye, every two minutes.”
Hear Professor Brian Schmidt being interviewed about SkyMapper by ABC radio’s Penny McLintock:http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/25/2580099.htm
