New telescope saves Earth from killer asteroid.

It sounds like the trailer for a sci-fi thriller, but it actually could come true.

Plans are under way for development of the world's largest survey telescope, which will be equipped with the world's largest digital camera.

Penn State University is part of a consortium of universities advancing the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, which promises astronomical discoveries comparable to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Once constructed, the LSST will scan the entire universe, take a census of heavenly bodies in the Milky Way galaxy, document more than 100 million black holes throughout the universe and help astronomers better understand dark matter and dark energy.

But charting dangerous asteroids gets top billing.

"We'll have a much better census of potentially dangerous asteroids to Earth," said Niel Brandt, a Penn State astronomer and astrophysicist. "This will give us a better idea of which ones could be hazardous."

The LSST will be constructed atop a mountain in Cerro Pachon, Chile. The hope is for the project, which has been under development since 2000, to be completed in 2014.

Those plans got a boost with recent donations of $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

That money will enable construction of LSST's three large mirrors, which are expected to take more than five years to manufacture. Mirror Laboratory at the University of Arizona already has begun producing the two largest mirrors.

The donations also will benefit development of other key elements of the LSST system.

The entire LSST project could cost $200 million to $300 million, Dr. Brandt said, and as a public-private partnership will require government funding. But he said the payoff in astronomical discoveries will be worth the price.

Every week, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky with its 3 billion-pixel digital camera. In 10 years of operation, it will take about 20,000 deep, multicolor exposures of every part of the sky, resulting in a color movie of the universe.

As such, the telescope will probe the mysteries of the universe and open "a movie-like window on objects that change or move," according to a Penn State news release.

The data will be downloaded to a computer that will analyze the information to determine anything that's moving. In that way, astronomers hope to receive early warning whenever an asteroid approaches Earth.

"Its ability to survey the sky rapidly and its sensitivity blows everything else off the map," said Dr. Brandt, leader of the LSST Active Galaxy/Quasar team. "All the technology comes together in a very sweet way."