Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Image credit: Olivier Bonin/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

The largest camera ever built for astrophysics has arrived at the summit of Cerro Pachón in Chile.

Transported from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) 3200-megapixel camera is the largest digital camera in the world. The device will soon be installed on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

The LSST camera will produce detailed images with a field of view seven times wider than the full Moon.

Image credit: NOIRLab/Inside Outer Space screengrab

Targets on tap

Once up and operating, the LSST camera is assigned multiple tasks, for instance: take detailed images of the southern hemisphere sky for 10 years, build the most comprehensive time-lapse view of our Universe ever seen.

Using the LSST Camera, exploring the nature of dark matter and dark energy, is on tap, along with mapping the Milky Way, surveying our Solar System, and studying celestial objects that change in brightness or position.

Two decades of work

Rubin Observatory is a program of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) NOIRLab, which, along with the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, will jointly operate Rubin.

Image credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

The NSF-funded Rubin Observatory Project Office for construction was established as an operating center under the management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA).

The DOE-funded effort to build the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera (LSSTCam) is managed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC), completed after two decades of work.

Go to this impressive video at:

https://noirlab.edu/public/media/archives/videos/hd_1080_screen/noirlab2413a.mp4