SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
After 20 years, researchers have finally completed work on the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera – one of the most advanced tools yet to search for life outside of the Solar System.
Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory said the 3,200-megapixel camera will provide details on the observable universe in “unprecedented” detail and generate vast quantities of data on the southern night sky that can be mined for new insights.
The team hopes the data will aid in the quest to understand dark energy, which is theorised to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe, and the hunt for dark matter, which makes up around 85% of the matter in the universe.
Once operational, the camera will map the positions and measure the brightness of a vast number of night-sky objects. It will also look for signs of weak gravitational lensing, in which massive galaxies subtly bend the paths light from background galaxies take to reach us. Weak lensing reveals something about the distribution of mass in the universe and how that has changed over time, which will help cosmologists understand how dark energy is driving the expansion of the universe.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Researchers also hope to use the telescope to further understanding into the changing night sky, the Milky Way and our own Solar System.
The LSST Camera is the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and will be able to capture the entire southern sky every three nights.
“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,” said Željko Ivezić, director of Rubin Observatory Construction and University of Washington professor.
The camera is roughly the size of a small car, weighs around 3,000kg and has a front lens that stretches over 1.5m across – the largest lens ever made for this purpose.
Another 3ft-wide lens had to be specially designed to maintain shape and optical clarity while also sealing the vacuum chamber that houses the camera’s focal plane. That focal plane is made up of 201 individual custom-designed CCD sensors and is so flat that it varies by no more than a tenth the width of a human hair. The pixels themselves are only 10 microns wide.
According to the researchers, the camera’s most important feature is its resolution, which is so high it would take hundreds of ultra-high-definition TVs to display just one of its images at full size.
“Its images are so detailed that it could resolve a golf ball from around 15 miles away, while covering a swathe of the sky seven times wider than the full moon. These images, with billions of stars and galaxies, will help unlock the secrets of the universe,” said Rubin Observatory deputy director Aaron Roodman.
“More than ever before, expanding our understanding of fundamental physics requires looking farther out into the universe.”
Now that the LSST Camera is complete and has been thoroughly tested at SLAC, it will be packed up, shipped to Chile and driven up 2,700m-high mountain Cerro Pachón in the Andes, where it will be hoisted atop the Simonyi Survey Telescope later this year.
E+T interviewed some of the scientists behind the project in the latest issue.
