Summer 1999 · Department Homepage

SOAR Telescope Breaks Ground
Horace Smith

The SOAR telescope is closer to reality after groundbreaking and the start of site preparation in Chile. The innovative new telescope is being built upon Cerro Pachon, a mountaintop not far from the existing Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. The SOAR telescope, which will have an objective mirror four meters in diameter, is a collaboration among the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, the University of North Carolina, the country of Brazil, and Michigan State University. Gene Capriotti, Susan Simkin, and Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies Robert Huggett represented MSU at the groundbreaking.

Cerro Pachon is located near the southern edge of Chile's Atacama desert. Skies there will not only be frequently clear, but the astronomical "seeing" (the sharpness of the star images) is also expected to be very good. The SOAR telescope is being designed to exacting mechanical and optical tolerances so as to be able to take full advantage of this excellent seeing and will be nearly diffraction-limited in the near infrared frequencies.

The Chilean location has other advantages as well. Whereas the astronomically active center of the Milky Way Galaxy barely rises far above the southern horizon as seen from Michigan, for the SOAR telescope it will pass spectacularly overhead. Moreover, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, can be well observed from Chile, but never rise above the horizon in Michigan.

The SOAR telescope will provide MSU astronomers with access to a world class astronomical instrument. Data links from Chile to Michigan will make the telescope accessible to Michigan students on and off the MSU campus, who will not need to travel to Chile to make use of the telescope. The Physics and Astronomy Department is now beating the bushes for donations to help raise MSU's six million dollar share of the cost of building the SOAR telescope. Roughly $2.1M has been raised to date.