The first privately funded space-based telescope is in the works

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy could help make history with a new project unveiled on Wednesday, the Lazuli Space Observatory. As reported by Science, the telescope was announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week, and could be the largest privately-funded space telescope in history thanks to investments from the Schmidts.

Lazuli’s design features a 3.1-meter mirror, which would make it larger than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (but smaller than the James Webb Space Telescope). It will also be equipped with a wide-field camera, a broadband integral-field spectrograph, and a coronagraph. Those instruments will be used to study everything from exoplanets to supernovae, but Schmidt Sciences also envisions Lazuli being used for “rapid response” purposes, such as quickly swiveling to gather data on objects spotted by other telescopes.

Lazuli is part of the Schmidt Observatory System, which also includes three ground-based observatories: the Argus Array, Deep Synoptic Array (DSA), and Large Fiber Array Spectroscopic Telescope (LFAST). According to Schmidt Sciences, the system of telescopes “is grounded in a commitment to open science: data and software will be broadly shared by default.” Scientists from all over the world, at any career level, will be able to utilize the telescopes and access the data collected with them. All four, including Lazuli, could be operational before the end of the decade.