Bill Gates to potentially save world with $10m donation to new telescope

Uncategorized
Share

Large_Synoptic_Survey_Telescope.jpgEveryone’s favourite billionaire is slightly poorer today (or next Wednesday, when the cheque clears), thanks to donating $10m to help build a massive new space-observing telescope.

The $400m telescope, being built in Chile, presumably because of all the cheap child labour (or clear mountain skies to look through), will monitor the entire sky once every three days by taking a photo of the stars every 15 seconds.

Officially known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the thing will be able to check for exciting live events, like stars going supernova or massive asteroids hurtling out of nowhere to turn planet Earth into planet Cockroach.

The ‘scope will be online by 2015 – and will be dumping most of its data onto the web for us all to look at and for crackpots to say anything vaguely weird or blurry is a UFO.

(Via Far East Gizmos)

Related posts
YouTube Hits: Former technology journo sings about Bill Gates on YouTube
How to dress like Microsoft’s Bill Gates for Halloween
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer likens relationship with Bill Gates to that of husband and wife. Awww!

Gary Cutlack
For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv

3 comments

  • Gotta love americans and their sence of humor about latin america and asia. Just look at the movies and tv shows.

  • Hey Elena,

    Clearly I am 100% ignorant about the Chilean labour scene, and yes, it was just a poor joke.

    I do know Chile’s quite near Argentina, though, and didn’t even have to check the spelling!

    Roll on 2015. Can’t wait to see some stars. Good luck with the telescope!

  • Dear Gary
    Your joke about cheap child labour in Chile is not really a good one, poor taste actually. Unless you imply that all children in Chile are scientist and engineers specializing in the designing and building of telescopes. Now, that is true !!!.

Comments are closed.