Today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Schmidt Sciences, a foundation backed by billionaires Eric and Wendy Schmidt, announced one of the largest ever private investments in astronomy: funding for an orbiting observatory larger than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, along with funds to build three novel ground-based observatories. The project aims to have all four components up and running by the end of the decade.
“We’re providing a new set of windows into the universe,” says Stuart Feldman, president of Schmidt Sciences, which will manage the observatory system. Time on the telescopes will be open to scientists worldwide, and data harvested by them will be available in linked databases. Schmidt Sciences declined to say how much it is investing but Feldman says the space telescope, called Lazuli, alone will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
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The observatory system is something of a departure for Schmidt Sciences, which usually hands out grants to scientists and their projects, Feldman says. With the new investment, Schmidt Sciences will lead the development and operation of the observatories. The foundation was already supporting early efforts for the three ground-based projects, but it decided last year to consolidate them into one program and add the Lazuli space telescope. “We told people to go and do it,” Feldman says. “There are real signatures on real agreements.”
