The 3.2 billion pixel camera in Chile is about to observe the universe

The world's largest digital camera LSST in Chile will help scientists study galaxies, asteroids and mysterious cosmic phenomena.

Optical lenses are moved to a room at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, California, where the 3.2 billion pixel LSST camera is assembled. (Photo: Farrin Abbott/SLAC)

The world's largest digital camera is being assembled at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, California, USA, preparing to move to operation at Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Chile, Interesting Engineering on 23 /11 reported. When completed, the project will take pictures of the southern half of the sky every three days, helping scientists explore deep space.

The Heritage Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is a 10-year southern sky study project at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This observatory is under construction on the El Penon summit of the Cerro Pachon mountain, northern Chile.

The survey data will help researchers around the world better understand many important issues about the properties of dark energy and dark matter, the formation of the Milky Way, the properties of small objects in the Solar System. The sun, the orbits of potentially dangerous asteroids, and the existence of explosive phenomena have not been detected.

LSST is a 3.2 billion pixel camera that is capable of looking into very distant space, which means looking back into the past, and photographing a large area. The camera is 1.7 m wide and 3 m long. The front includes 3 optional lenses and filters, the rear is the focal plane.

The camera has six rotating optical filters that can be changed depending on what the astronomers want to capture and the lighting conditions in the night. The filters offer the opportunity to capture the sky in 6 different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared.

According to the original plan, the camera would be installed in Chile in 2014. However, the manufacturing process encountered many delays, most recently due to Covid-19. Managing a large team of interdisciplinary scientists and engineers can also be difficult. "Without Covid-19, we would have shipped the camera about a year ago," astrophysicist Steven Kahn, director of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, shared.