Nine years and 3.2 billion pixels later, it’s complete: the LSST camera is the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy, and will form the centerpiece of the Vera Rubin Observatory, ready to begin exploring the southern sky.
The primary goal of the Rubin Observatory is the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a comprehensive, near-continuous observation of space. The work will generate 60 petabytes of data on the composition of the universe, the nature and distribution of dark matter, dark energy and the expansion of the universe, the formation of our galaxy, our intimate little solar system, and more.
The camera will use its 5.1-foot-wide optical lens to take 15-second exposures of the sky every 20 seconds, automatically changing filters to view every wavelength of light from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared. Its continued monitoring of the sky will eventually lead to time-lapse photography of the sky; it will highlight fleeting events for other scientists to train telescopes and monitor changes in the southern sky.
“We will soon begin work on the greatest movie ever made and the message ever created,” Željko Ivezić, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington and director of construction of the Rubin Observatory, said in a press release from SLAC. The richest map of the night sky.”
To do this, the team needed a Rolls-Royce digital camera. Note that this camera actually costs millions of times the price of a real Royce Royce and weighs 6,200 pounds (2,812 kilograms), which is heavier than a luxury car. Each of the 21 rafts that make up the camera’s focal plane are Maserati-priced, and if they collect the data scientists expect, they’ll be worth every penny. Gizmodo got a tour of this camera in a clean room in 2021 — and you can Read all about it here.
“I’m personally most excited about using gravitational lensing to study the expansion of the universe to better understand dark energy,” Aaron Roodman, a physicist at SLAC and leader of the camera project, said in an email to Gizmodo. “This means two things: 1) measure the brightness of all six filters of our billions of galaxies, and very carefully measure their shapes, which are subtly altered by the bending of light by matter; 2) Discover and study the very special phenomenon of distant quasars aligning almost perfectly with closer galaxies.”
Ruderman said in a press release from SLAC that the camera’s images can “resolve a golf ball from approximately 15 miles away while covering a sky seven times wider than the full moon.” Next time you try (and fail) to use your phone camera Consider this when taking a decent photo of the moon.
although it is It’s getting harder and harder to see the stars The Rubin Observatory is located high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a well-known hotspot for telescopes thanks to its human-made sky glow.Unfortunately, even in such dry, high altitude, cloudless locations, telescopes are not immune to the effects of light pollution leave Earth: satellite. When satellites pass overhead, their light leaves long streaks in telescope images. A group of satellites working together, called a constellation, causing more difficult problems.
“The current constellation will be a big nuisance, but we can solve that problem by eliminating the streaks on the images produced by these satellites,” Ruderman said. “But if the number and brightness of these satellites increases, then will have a greater and more negative impact on our 10-year investigation.”
A 2022 review The content of the question indicates that SpaceX’s entire constellation of 42,000 satellites will appear in 30% of LSST camera images, not to mention other satellites operating in low Earth orbit. There are some solutions to annoying streaks; last yearA team of researchers from the Space Telescope Science Institute has announced a method to “clean up” satellites from Hubble Space Telescope images. However, clutter in space is like clutter in the kitchen: it’s best not to have them in the first place.
The first images from the Rubin Observatory are expected to be publicly released in March 2025, which still feels far away. But there are still several important agenda items that need to be implemented. First, the SLAC team must safely transport the LSST camera from its current home in northern California to Chile. (Don’t worry—they’ve already given the ride a trial run.) Then, the observatory’s mirrors need to be ready for testing, and the observatory’s dome must be completed, and some other tasks.but whenever Once complete, the heritage survey will launch a decade of scientific discovery.
According to a release from SLAC, Rubin Observatory estimates indicate that LSST could “increase the number of known objects by a factor of 10.” Basically, keeping an eye on large swaths of the sky will reveal just how dynamic our universe really is, both in our cosmic neighbor and beyond where the Stars and Stripes twinkle.
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