Overview
- Announced at the American Astronomical Society winter meeting, Lazuli is billed as the first full-scale space observatory funded privately.
- The telescope is planned with a three-meter mirror and three instruments—a coronagraph, a wide-field camera, and a spectrograph—to study exoplanet atmospheres, transients, and cosmology.
- Schmidt Sciences says Lazuli’s observations will be released quickly and broadly, describing the data as a gift to the global astrophysics community.
- Lazuli is part of the Schmidt Observatory System alongside modular ground arrays, including the Deep Synoptic Array and the Argus Array, which are targeted to begin producing science by 2029.
- Project leaders say the effort is meant to complement agencies such as NASA and NSF, while astronomers voiced enthusiasm as well as concerns over access and potential effects on public funding, with cost and launch timing still unconfirmed and reported as possibly hundreds of millions and before 2030.