The world's biggest digital camera is almost ready to be installed on its telescope
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September 23, 2022
Joe Palca
Technicians are putting the final touches on the world's largest digital camera at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The camera will be sent to Chile and installed on a telescope in the Andes.
Hear brief audio, NPR, at:
https://www.wbur.org/npr/1124836940/the-worlds-biggest-digital-camera-is-almost-ready-to-be-installed-on-its-telesco
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Article from one year ago:
The World’s Largest Digital Camera is Almost Ready to Shoot the Stars
NOV 23, 2021 ANETE LUSINA
The world’s largest digital camera with a resolution of 3.2-gigapixels is being prepared for installation atop a Chilean mountain where it will scan the sky to help scientists gain knowledge about the Milky Way, dark matter, and other phenomena.
Work on the giant camera, named “The Legacy Survey of Space and Time” (LSST), has been underway for several years now; the team of researchers captured the first photo with it in 2020
The camera is currently assembled at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, and will eventually be installed in Vera C. Rubin Observatory in northern Chile, although the pandemic has added an additional delay to the roadmap of the project, Gizmodo reports.
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L1 Lens of the camera polished and coated with a broadband antireflective coating by Safran-Reosc. Photo by SAFRAN.
This photo features the ComCam from the optics side. The wide vertical metal object is the filter exchanger, which holds 3 filters at once. Photo by Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA.
Now that it has arrived at the Tucson instrumentation shop, the ComCam cryostat assembly (built by SLAC) will be integrated with the camera optics and parts of the telescope structure and tested under software control as it will be in Chile. Photo by Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA.
More:
https://petapixel.com/2021/11/23/the-worlds-largest-resolution-camera-is-almost-ready-for-deployment/
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RUBIN OBSERVATORY'S LEGACY SURVEY OF SPACE AND TIME
Ranked as the top ground-based national priority for the field for the current decade, Vera C. Rubin Observatory, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, is currently under construction in Chile. The U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is leading the construction of its camera – the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy, which will be mounted on the Simonyi Survey Telescope. During the first 10 years of operations, Rubin Observatory will conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of the entire southern sky and provide the widest, fastest and deepest views of the night sky ever observed. SLAC Professor Steven M. Kahn is the director of the observatory, and SLAC personnel are also participating in the data management. Rubin Observatory is a federal project jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, with early construction funding received from private donations through the LSST Corporation.
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CAMERA OVERVIEW
About the size of a small SUV, the LSST Camera is the largest camera ever constructed for astronomy. It is a large-aperture, wide-field optical camera that is capable of viewing light from the near ultraviolet to near infrared wavelengths.
More:
https://lsst.slac.stanford.edu/
