This week in the USA, engineers of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory completed the assembly of LSST (Legacy Survey of Space and Time) – the world's largest digital camera with a resolution of 3200 megapixels.
This is reported by Voice of America.
This camera will later be installed on a telescope at the Vera Rubin Observatory, the construction of which is currently under the patronage of the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The camera will become the technical "heart" observatory currently under construction atop Cerro Pachon in Chile. The scientific complex is named after Vera Rubin, an American astronomer who studied the speed of rotation of galaxies. The results of the scientist's research gave science one of the main evidences of the existence of dark matter.
It is noted that the camera will be raised to the construction site of the observatory in the Andes to a height of 2.7 km.
The camera, the size of a small car, weighs about three tons, and its front lens has a diameter of more than one and a half meters (the diameter of the second lens is about a meter). A cryostat will be added to the camera matrix, the task of which is to cool the LSST components to reduce noise.
At the same time, the creators of LSST claim that the main feature of the camera is its resolution.
"Its (LSST – ed.) images are so detailed that it can see a golf ball about 15 miles (24 km – ed.) away, covering a swath of sky seven times wider than the full moon . These images with billions of stars and galaxies will help reveal the secrets of the universe, said Aaron Rudman, deputy director of the Vera Rubin Observatory. The scientific community expects a colossal amount of astronomical data from the telescope. Among them is the search for signs of dark energy and dark matter – a mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of the universe known to science. For this, the camera must find evidence of the so-called weak gravitational lensing – a phenomenon in which massive galaxies slightly distort the light coming from other galaxies. Studying this distortion can give scientists a better understanding of the distribution of mass in the universe and what place dark matter occupies in it.
Researchers also have plans to use data from the Rubin Observatory to map the Milky Way galaxy and our solar system in detail.
The camera is expected to receive its first image no earlier than 2025.