Penn’s new High Bay Lab home for super-sensitive telescope

Penn’s astronomers now have room to build huge instruments thanks to a new lab completed this month.

Penn’s new High Bay Lab, attached to the David Rittenhouse Laboratory, is a cube of metal and glass punctuated with a protruding yellow crane arm and full-height glass doors that was designed by Buell Kratzer Powell. The lab’s design allows Penn scientists the space to build, test, and rebuild, the telescope (and other large instruments) over time.

The High Bay Lab’s first inhabitant is the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope – aka BLAST – which Penn astronomers and a team of international researchers use to collect data about how stars and galaxies form and evolve. (Is that all?!)

Mark Devlin, an Astronomy and Physics professor who lead the BLAST project, told the Daily Pennsylvanian, “This is something I’ve needed for the past 10 years.”