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The camera is known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Aaron Roodman declared, "We are in the Guinness Book of World Records."
In the Vera C. Rubin observatory dome, where the camera was recently placed, Roodman, the LSST camera project leader, spoke with ABC7 from Chile.
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| Image Source :The Times Of India |
The National Science Foundation and the Office of Science at the United States Department of Energy sponsor the observatory.
The camera, with 3 billion pixels and the largest lens ever created for astronomy, was designed to capture as much of the sky as possible.
"We like to say that we're going to make a color movie of the entire Southern Hemisphere sky," Roodman told me. It's all part of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, after which the camera was called.
The camera will scan the sky over and over again for 10 years, making a very detailed time-lapse record of the universe.
We want to investigate dark energy, which is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate, but we don't know much about it. We will investigate dark matter. We will investigate galaxies and how they form throughout the cosmos.
We will investigate our own galaxy, the Milky Way, in order to better comprehend its creation and the location of dark matter. "We'll also investigate the solar system," Roodman stated. The camera, weighing 6000 pounds, was created in Menlo Park's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a hub for scientists, engineers, and technicians.
We actually took advantage of so much of that expertise at SLAC," Roodman said, "since the camera is so enormous and we had to employ so many custom-built components," so we had to build them ourselves or tell firms exactly what we required. We truly required a diverse set of skills, and SLAC was the ideal venue to achieve that."
"We chartered a 747, to bring the camera and about 10 other truckloads of equipment from SLAC here to Chile, so it was pretty involved," Roodman informed me.
After arriving, the camera underwent testing before being placed earlier this month atop the Rubin Observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope.
"We hope to get our very first images next month," Roodman stated. He stated that the data collected is public and would be available to the whole US science community as well as selected foreign partners who have contributed.
"I think actually some of the most excitement will come from things that we can't predict today because the data is so rich," Roodman said, "And if we're looking at the sky in a way we've never looked before, I think people's creativity will uncover some fantastic new things." The 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time is expected to begin this fall, pending more tests.
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