The space race is no longer just a matter of large public agencies such as NASA or ESA. Private companies are playing an increasingly relevant role, especially in the development of rockets and satellites. Until now, one of the few unexplored areas for the private sector was space telescopes. However, if all goes well, that will soon change with the launch of Lazuli, a telescope built by Schmidt Sciences to study exoplanets that others haven’t been able to analyze in depth.
23 colors. Lazuli will have a 3-meter primary mirror, larger than Hubble’s, and will be able to observe the sky in 23 colors from visible light to near-infrared. You will also have a spectrograph, which will allow you to understand the composition of celestial objects thanks to the analysis of the light they emit or reflect.
Your main device. Beyond its wide range of colors and its spectral analysis, Lazuli stands out for an instrument called the Extrasolar Coronagraph (ESC). Its purpose is to block the light from distant stars so that it does not interfere with the light reflected by the planets orbiting them. He said a lot RoughlyIt will create small artificial eclipses to focus all the attention on the exoplanets you want to analyze.
27 candidates. Two scientists from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona recently published a study outlining 27 giant exoplanets that would be ideal candidates for studying Lazuli. That doesn’t mean they have to be studied, but they seem like good candidates.
cold monster. Due to technical limitations regarding time and focus, the only exoplanets that space telescopes focus on are hot Jupiters. These exoplanets are very close to their stars, so they have shorter transits and orbit the star more per unit than planets that are further away. This makes them easier to identify.
The problem is that the giants of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, are far from the Sun. Therefore, their characteristics are quite different. The ideal would be to study cold gas giants. Until now this has been a technical challenge, but Lazuli is better equipped to do so thanks to its coronagraph, which allows it to capture the faint light of distant planets. 27 candidates are exactly like this.
More devices. Lazuli will work as a team with other instruments developed by Schmidt Sciences: the ARGUS and LFAST ground-based optical arrays and the Deep Synoptic Array radio telescopes. They will all share software and data, so that one’s search can easily be followed by another.
Also public bodies. The study these scientists conducted, even without peer review, noted that other telescopes that are already operational may also be working on the same candidates. This is, for example, the case of the recently released Nancy Grace Roman or the experienced Very Large Telescope (VLT). Again, data can be shared, so that public and private telescopes can work as a team.
the date. There is no fixed date for Lazuli’s launch yet. However, if all goes well, Schmidt Sciences expects it to launch in 2028 or, at the latest, 2029. Until then, work will continue on both its development and the search for candidates so it can analyze them.
Picture Schmidt Sciences
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