After more than a decade of development and planning, the National Science Foundation has approved federal construction of the LSST. The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, of which the University of Pennsylvania is a member, will manage the $473 million construction project.
The LSST will be constructed atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the highest, driest locations in the world. It will see first light in 2019 and begin full science operations in 2022.
Bhuvnesh Jain, Mike Jarvis, Larry Gladney, Gary Bernstein and Masao Sako of the Department of Physics & Astronomy in the School of Arts & Sciences are involved in LSST. Jain leads LSST’s cosmology effort as spokesperson for its Dark Energy Science Collaboration, while Jarvis is co-coordinator of its weak gravitational lensing working group.
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