Hubble. Webb. Chandra. Spitzer. Rubin. Roman. And now, Simonyi.
With the ramping up of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi joins a select group of scientists and technologists, policymakers and philanthropists who have had world-class telescopes and observatories named after them.
But here’s the thing: Technically speaking, the Simonyi Survey Telescope isn’t named after Charles Simonyi alone.
“The idea was to create something that carries the family name, and I was more thinking about my dad, Simonyi Károly,” Charles Simonyi told GeekWire, using the Hungarian manner of speech for personal names. “He was a professor at Budapest University. He wrote a wonderful book called ‘The Cultural History of Physics,’ which is available now in English at Amazon.”
Simonyi said his father was best-known for his work in popularizing science, “to make science understandable to the great public.” The physicist’s son arguably had an even greater impact on our computer-centric society by taking a leading role in creating Word, Excel and other tools for Microsoft’s Office suite of applications back in the 1980s. Four decades later, Word is still the world’s most widely used word processing software, and Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet.
Now the Simonyi Survey Telescope promises to have a similarly transformative and long-lasting impact on astronomy. Built at the Rubin Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, the telescope is designed to survey the full sky every three nights, generating about 20 terabytes of raw data daily.
The Rubin construction team — headed by University of Washington astronomer Zeljko Ivezic — is currently deep into getting the telescope ready for its official debut in the spring of 2025. And there’s yet another Seattle tech connection to the project: UW’s DiRAC Institute is heavily involved in developing tools for analyzing the torrents of data that will come from the Rubin Observatory.
The Simonyi Survey Telescope is unlike the Hubble Space Telescope or NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which can focus on an incredibly tiny spot in the sky.
“It’s a little bit like having a camera, and then it’s a difference between a wide-angle lens and a telescopic lens,” Simonyi explained. “It’s not like one of them is better. There are things that you can do with a telescopic lens, but if you don’t have a wide-angle lens, you’re missing a lot of interesting things.”
There’s a wide range of interesting things that the telescope is suited to study. Readings from the Rubin Observatory are expected to help astronomers learn more about dark matter and dark energy, the unseen stuff that makes up 95% of the universe’s content. The observatory will serve as an early warning system for transient phenomena in the night sky, alerting other telescope teams around the world to track supernovas, gamma-ray bursts and other cosmic fireworks.
Simonyi is looking forward to an avalanche of discoveries relating to asteroids, comets and interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua, the cigar-shaped space rock that passed through the inner solar system in 2017. Studies predict that the Rubin Observatory could detect as many as 70 interstellar objects every year — and about 130 near-Earth objects, mostly asteroids, every night!
“I’m certainly not looking for an asteroid that is threatening the Earth,” Simonyi said. “But it’s good to know where those asteroids are, and this number of 5 million to 10 million objects in our solar system is something worth thinking about. Quite a few of these will be trans-Neptunian objects — that is, things like Pluto. And among those there might be the Planet X that Pluto was supposed to be.”
How did Simonyi end up getting a telescope named for his family? That part of the story goes back to the origins of the Rubin Observatory — which was initially known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. (Today that acronym refers to the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, the Rubin Observatory’s top priority.)
One of the earliest advocates for the telescope was Tony Tyson, an astronomer who eventually became the Rubin Observatory’s chief scientist.
“He had this dream of a very, very large survey telescope which he then called the LSST, and in 2004, he approached Bill Gates with a proposal to fund just the mirror — because, you know, the mirror is the long lead-time item. It takes many years to cast it, to have it cool down, and then to polish it.”
Simonyi said Gates was very excited about the idea, but had other priorities for his philanthropic giving.
“He kindly and very generously approached me, and suggested that I put up the founding investment into this enterprise. And he joined me. So, the two of us funded the creation of the mirror, which got the ball rolling.”
Simonyi contributed $20 million in seed funding, and Gates kicked in $10 million. Eventually, funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy exceeded the billionaires’ contributions. “You know, NSF had a much easier time raising the funds in Congress,” Simonyi said with a laugh. “Now it’s nearing a billion dollars. So it was a fast-growing company, if you will.”
You could think of Charles Simonyi as the first angel investor to buy into what will become one of the world’s most powerful telescopes — with the payoff on that investment coming in the form of scientific discoveries. No wonder the telescope bears his name.
In this week’s GeekWire Podcast, Simonyi provides a wide-angle perspective on the telescope and his involvement in the project.. He also reflects on his two multimillion-dollar trips to the International Space Station in 2007 and 2009, and talks about the possibility of taking on yet another space odyssey. Here are a few edited sound bites to whet your appetite:
What are the big mysteries that the Rubin Observatory will help solve? “Astronomy is now a mirror of physics. The Big Bang explains elementary particles. In a way, it’s physics writ large, but in a way, it’s very much connected to the physics of the quarks and below. It all has to do with data. Another place where data comes in is, for example, supernovae.
“Dark matter is still a big puzzle. And it’s worth noting that Vera Rubin was very instrumental in noticing the pattern of galaxy rotation that created this issue of the rotational problem. Why don’t galaxies just fly apart? What keeps them together? There’s not enough mass — or visible mass, at least — in a galaxy that would explain the kind of rotation that was first observed by Vera Rubin.
“It’s also interesting that Dr. Rubin had to do her own observations and theories together, because nobody would do the observations for her. The experimentalists and theoreticians were, historically, pretty much the same person. … But now it’s going to be completely different, in that the data will come in automatically, and people will be sitting at computers and working the data.”
How are the telescope’s mirrors ground into shape? “The grinding is done by computerized tools these days, and always checked with lasers for the exact measurement. It’s very careful work. One day, we got a phone call that somebody dropped a tool on the ground mirror. Of course, the first thought was that, I hope the person was fired — which is a horrible thought. But it turns out that the person was the most important and best-equipped person. So, it was an unfortunate accident.
“It turns out that it doesn’t hurt it at all. You simply plug the hole with epoxy, and because the mirror counts as a whole in collecting information, having one-millionth of its surface be less than totally perfect is not going to make any difference. So, you learn something about that, too — that accidents happen, and they don’t stop progress.”
What’s it like to visit the telescope? “They essentially have a national park that is reserved for astronomy. There must be, I don’t know, at least 40 or 50 telescopes within that park. And the special feature of the park is that there’s no light pollution.
“The closest city, La Serena, is about 100 kilometers away. People don’t drive at night, and there are precautions in the whole area to keep the light pollution to a minimum. Of course, the only people there are people that are associated with the various telescopes, and they definitely respect the need for the conditions of respecting the purpose of the place.”
Would you take another trip to space? “Yes, I think going to space again is a possibility. I’m not sure if my family would like to go, but maybe they will. I was thinking that space travel might become more routine, probably in 10 years, than it had been when I was flying…
“There are great elements of spaceflight: the observation of the Earth … seeing day and night, seeing winter and summer, seeing the northern latitudes and the equatorial region, seeing the seas and the land, all in a very rapid progression. That’s really wonderful. The experience of weightlessness is itself an interesting, and I have to say, a very pleasant sensation…. If my family is interested, I would certainly join them, and maybe even point out some interesting details.”
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Audio editing by Curt Milton.
https://ift.tt/o6WRBNb September 28, 2024 at 01:08PM GeekWire
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