Posted on May 25, 2009 by by valerirojas

The new $13 million Australian National University (ANU) SkyMapper Telescope was launch today, 25th May.

The telescope was launched by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Senator Kim Carr at the Stromlo facility and the NSW Governor Professor Marie Bashir AC CVO, video-linked in from Coonabarabran.

“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.

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. ANU

SkyMapper website.

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