The journey to transport the world's largest camera to the top of the mountain

The 3-ton digital camera overcame the journey by plane and truck to safely reach the observatory on the top of the mountain over 2,700m high .

After two decades of development, the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory 's central camera arrived at its home last week. Currently, the camera is located on top of Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile. This camera is the last major part of the Rubin Observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope . There, the equipment will be installed after several months of thorough testing. Safely and successfully transporting a large SUV-sized camera from its manufacturing site, the SLAC National Acceleration Laboratory in California, to a mountaintop location in the Andes, Chile, is no small achievement, according to Space .

Journey from California to Chile of LSST camera. Video: (Rubin Observatory).

This is the largest camera ever built for astronomy , weighing 3 tons and measuring 1.5 meters wide. So, to minimize the risk to the $168 million device, scientists and engineers carried out a run-through in 2021 when they shipped a similar-sized replica to Chile. The simulation is equipped with data recording equipment to record the conditions that the real camera will experience during the journey.

"Shipping such a sophisticated device around the world involves many risks. With 10 years of camera assembly, culminating in a 10-hour flight and a winding dirt road up a mountain, getting it right very important ," said Margaux Lopez, a mechanical engineer at SLAC, in charge of planning the camera's transportation. "But because we have experience and data from the test shipment, we are confident that we can protect the camera safely."

On May 14, the camera was delivered to San Francisco airport for the 10-hour flight to Chile. The device flew on a Boeing 747 cargo plane, landing the next day at Santiago International Airport in Chile, the closest airport to the Rubin observatory that can accommodate an aircraft this large. The next evening, the camera and the convoy of nine trucks were safely inside the security gate at the Cerro Pachón station. The next morning, the device began a 5-hour journey on a winding 35 km dirt road to the mountain peak more than 2,713 m above sea level.

"Our goal is to ensure the camera is not only intact but also arrives in perfect condition ," said Kevin Reil, a scientist at the Rubi Observatory. Subsequent testing confirmed the camera did not experience any unexpected stress over the long run. According to Rei, initial indicators, including information collected by data loggers, accelerometers and shock sensors, show they were successful.

LSST Camera.

The camera's successful arrival at the observatory is good news not only for all the scientists and engineers involved in the project but also for the generation of astronomers eagerly awaiting the observatory's operation, expected late next year. That's when the Rubin Observatory conducted a decade-long study of the universe by taking panoramic images of the southern sky every few evenings, helping to catalog some 37 billion objects. This survey is called "Legacy Survey of Space and Time".

The LSST camera set a world record in 2020 with the largest photo taken with a giant digital camera. Scientists say just one 3,200-megapixel photo would require 378 ultra-high-definition 4K TVs to display. Its resolution is so good that it can detect a golf ball from 25km away. Using data from the 10-year survey, astronomers hope to gather clues about the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which make up more than 90% of the mass of the universe but cannot be detected directly. Most importantly, the LSST camera will search for and study signs of weak gravitational lensing, a cosmic phenomenon that occurs when a large galaxy bends or distorts light from the background galaxy.