After two decades of work, scientists and engineers at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory announced the completion of the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy.
The 3,200-megapixel Legacy Study of Space and Time (LSST) camera will help researchers observe our universe in unprecedented detail.
The LSST will be installed at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Chile) and will collect images of about 20 billion galaxies.
With the completion of the single LSST camera at SLAC and its imminent integration into the rest of the Rubin Observatory systems in Chile, we will soon begin producing the best movie of all time and the most informative map of the night sky ever created, commented Zeljko Ivezic , Construction Director of the Rubin Observatory.
The camera is about the size of a small car and weighs about three kilograms. Its front lens measures more than 1.5 meters, the largest lens ever made for this purpose.
Another meter-wide lens had to be specially designed to maintain shape and optical clarity, while sealing the vacuum pump that houses the camera’s enormous focal plane. The latter is made up of 201 individual custom-designed sensors and is so flat that it varies no more than a tenth of the width of a human hair. The pixels themselves are only 10 microns wide.
The camera’s most important feature is its resolution, which is so high that it would take hundreds of ultra-high-definition televisions to display just one of its full-size images, explained SLAC professor and Rubin Observatory deputy director Aaron Roodman.
Their images are so detailed that they could detect a golf ball about 15 miles (24 kilometers) away, while covering a swath of sky seven times wider than the full moon. These images with billions of stars and galaxies will help unlock the secrets of the universe, Roodman said.
Over a decade, the camera will generate an enormous amount of data about the night sky of the southern hemisphere. That data will help understand dark energy and search for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about 85 percent of the matter in the universe. Researchers also plan to use Rubin’s enormous sensitivity to better understand changes in the night sky, the Milky Way, and our own solar system.
The LSST camera will look for signs of weak gravitational lensing, by which massive galaxies subtly bend the path that light from background galaxies takes to reach us. The weak lensing reveals something about the distribution of mass in the universe and how it has changed over time, which will help cosmologists understand how dark energy drives the expansion of the universe. (Text and photos: RT)
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