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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is scheduled for first science light later this year. It is an infrared telescope with an 8.4 m aperture, a 3.2 gigapixel(!) camera, and the ability to perform a full sky scan every few days.
Among its tasks is mapping the Solar System. It is expected to increase the number of known small Solar System bodies by a factor of 10 to 100. Potentially it could find the hypothetical Planet Nine. The telescope will also capture transient events such as supernovae, help map the Milky Way, and study dark matter.
The world’s largest camera with a 3,200-megapixel sensor is one step closer to being sent to its new home at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. For the last seven years, scientists and engineers have worked to develop and build a camera that will form the heart of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time telescope and hopefully help us to better understand dark matter and dark energy which make up about 95% of the universe.
That’s when the telescope will begin collecting 20 terabytes of data every night for 10 years. With it, scientists will build a vast map of the sky as seen from the southern hemisphere, including 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars in the Milky Way—a significant fraction of all galaxies in the universe and of all stars in our own galaxy, Roodman says. They’ll also amass images of 6 million asteroids and other objects in our solar system. Such a gigantic cosmic database would’ve been unthinkable until very recently.
That fire hose of valuable data will come thanks to this new, nearly 3-ton camera. Its imaging sensor is made up of more than 200 custom-designed charge-coupled devices (CCDs), and they’ll take images with six filters covering the optical electromagnetic spectrum, from violet to the edge of infrared.
Nine years and 3.2 billion pixels later, it is complete: the LSST Camera stands as the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and will serve as the centerpiece of the Vera Rubin Observatory, poised to begin its exploration of the southern skies.
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Rubin Observatory estimates suggest that LSST could “increase the number of known objects by a factor of 10,” according to a SLAC release. Basically, having such a constant eye on a large swathe of the sky will reveal how dynamic our universe truly is, both in our cosmic neighborhood and the star-spangled yonder.
The 3200-megapixel LSST Camera, the groundbreaking instrument at the core of the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, has arrived at the observatory site on Cerro Pachón in Chile. The LSST Camera — the largest digital camera in the world — was built at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, and its completion after two decades of work was announced by SLAC early in April. This incredibly sensitive camera will soon be installed on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at Rubin Observatory, where it will produce detailed images with a field of view seven times wider than the full moon.
This camera cost a mere $168 million.
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