Announced today at a special session of the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS’s) annual winter meeting, the Lazuli Space Observatory is a project of Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic organization built by investor Wendy Schmidt and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Its three instruments—a planet-finding coronagraph, a high-resolution wide-field camera and a light-splitting spectrograph—will study the atmospheres of distant worlds, dissect the light from exploding stars and tackle mysteries such as the nature of dark energy, the enigmatic force that drives the universe’s accelerating expansion. Lazuli is just one of several large projects comprising the Schmidt Observatory System—initiatives that Feldman characterizes as “risky but exciting.” The others are all ground-based and share a common design element in that they’re modular, using hundreds of small and relatively low-cost components to create much larger and more capable arrays.
Author: Nadia Drake
Published at: 2026-01-07 22:00:00
Still want to read the full version? Full article
