Scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy’s(DOE) Office of Science with other collaborators are celebrating the completion of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera after years of hardwork.
The Camera which took about nine years to construct is a 3.2-billion-pixel camera that can collect 15 terabytes of data, and is considered to be the largest digital camera ever made by man.
The digital masterpiece was designed actually to further research into dark matter and dark energy which Despite making up 95 percent of the mass-energy of the universe, according to researchers, remains pretty much undetected.
The LSST camera is to be sited at the Vera C Rubin observatory in Chile and is expected to generate an enormous trove of data over ten years on the southern night sky that researchers will mine for new insights into the universe. Researchers also have plans to use Rubin data to better understand the changing night sky, the Milky Way galaxy, and our own solar system.
According to Director of Rubin Observatory Construction and University of Washington professor Željko Ivezić, the SLAC team and its partners built the largest digital camera ever constructed for astronomy.
The camera is roughly the size of a small car and weighs around 3,000 kilograms (3 metric tons), and its front lens is over five feet across – the largest lens ever made for this purpose.
In his words, “With the completion of the unique LSST Camera at SLAC and its imminent integration with the rest of Rubin Observatory systems in Chile, we will soon start producing the greatest movie of all time and the most informative map of the night sky ever assembled,”
