The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a Public-Private partnership, has received a $30 million boost from Charles Simonyi, formerly of Microsoft and now chief executive of Intentional Software, and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. Simonyi, who also made headlines last year for being a space tourist, contributed $20 million and Gates contributed the remaining $10 million.

The 8.4m Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is to be located on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, a 2682 metre high peak in northern Chile, near the existing Gemini South, SOAR and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory telescopes. Its main features are a wide field of view and a powerful 3.2 gigapixel prime focus digital camera.

"LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore," Gates said.

The project, identified as a national scientific priority in reports by several national panels, will yield some 200,000 pictures a year, and up to 30 Terabytes per night in data. The data will be public, with some made available by Google, another contributor, as an up-to-date interactive night-sky map.

"What a shock it was when Galileo saw in his telescope the phases of Venus, or the moons of Jupiter, the first hints of a dynamic universe," Simonyi said. "Today, by building a special telescope-computer complex, we can study this dynamism in unprecedented detail."

Eventually, the new telescope will provide unprecedented 3-dimensional maps of the mass distribution in the Universe. It will also be able to detect potentially hazardous asteroids as small as 100 meters in size. However, most of its work will consist of particular scientific goals such as detecting and measuring gravitational lensing; mapping the Milky way; and recording optical events such as Novae and Supernovae.

There is also a competing project, the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), whose primary goal will be to keep an eye on the entire sky, automatically looking for unexpected changes such as the presence of near-Earth objects that threaten to cause impact events. That 3-telescope system has already secured enough funding for its construction.

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), named after its main funder, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was kickstarted last October near the town of Hat Creek, just north of Lassen Volcanic National Park in the remote northeast corner of California. The initial 42 antennas of the Allen Telescope Array have started receiving electromagnetic radiation from space, with more than 300 to join them in the following years.