Largest digital camera ever created for astronomy begins mission
What's the story
US government-backed SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California has completed work on Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, the largest digital camera ever created for astronomy.
This device, with a 3,200MP resolution, is set to be incorporated into the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Over a decade, it will produce an immense quantity of data on the southern night sky, contributing to our understanding of the composition of the universe, dark energy and dark matter.
Camera capabilities
It offers an unprecedented resolution
The LSST Camera, comparable in size to a car and weighing around 3,000 kilograms, offers an extraordinary resolution.
It has a 5.1-foot-wide optical lens and will take 15-second-long shots of the sky every 20 seconds.
Displaying just one of its images at full size would require hundreds of ultra-high-definition TVs.
Aaron Roodman, Deputy Director and Camera Program Lead at Rubin Observatory, stated that the camera's images are so detailed it could resolve a golf ball from around 24km away.
Deployment
LSST camera to aid in understanding universe's expansion
Later this year, the LSST Camera will be transported to Chile for installation on top of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at 8,900-foot-high Cerro Pachon in the Andes.
Once operational, it will chart positions and gauge brightness levels of countless night-sky objects.
The camera will specifically search for indications of weak gravitational lensing, providing information about how mass is distributed in the universe over time.
It will assist cosmologists in understanding how dark energy propels the universe's expansion.
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'LSST Camera will help create most detailed night sky map'
"We will soon start producing the greatest movie of all time and the most informative map of the night sky ever assembled," said Zeljko Ivezic, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington.