World’s most powerful, largest digital camera will image 37 billion stars and galaxies

3.2-gigapixel digital camera will take digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights, producing 15 Terabytes of data
September 1, 2015

The LSST’s camera will include a filter-changing mechanism and shutter. This animation shows that mechanism at work, which allows the camera to view different wavelengths; the camera is capable of viewing light from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared (0.3-1 μm) wavelengths. (credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

The Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera — the world’s largest — at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries.

Assembled at the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the camera will be the eye of LSST.

Starting in 2022, LSST will take digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights from atop a high mountain called Cerro Pachón in Chile. It will produce a wide, deep, and fast survey of the night sky, cataloging by far the largest number of stars and galaxies ever observed.

During a 10-year time frame, LSST will detect tens of billions of objects and will create movies of the sky with unprecedented details.

In one shot, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope’s 3.2-gigapixel camera will capture an area of the sky 40 times the size of the full moon (or almost 10 square degrees of sky). LSST’s large mirror and large field of view work together to deliver more light from faint astronomical objects than any optical telescope in the world. (credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

The telescope’s camera — the size of a small car and weighing more than three tons — will capture full-sky images at such high resolution that it would take 1,500 high-definition television screens to display just one of them.

Components of the camera are being built by an international collaboration of universities and labs, including DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Building and testing the camera will take approximately five years.

This exploded view of the LSST’s digital camera highlights its various components, including lenses, shutter and filters. (credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

SLAC is also designing and constructing the NSF-funded database for the telescope’s data management system. LSST will generate a vast public archive of data — approximately 6 million gigabytes per year, or the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular 8-megapixel digital camera every night, albeit of much higher quality and scientific value. This data will help researchers study the formation of galaxies, track potentially hazardous asteroids, observe exploding stars, and better understand dark matter and dark energy, which together make up 95 percent of the universe but whose natures remain unknown.

The National Research Council’s Astronomy and Astrophysics decadal survey, Astro2010, ranked the LSST as the top ground-based priority for the field for the current decade. The recent report of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel of the federal High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, setting forth the strategic plan for U.S. particle physics, also recommended completion of the LSST.

Funding for the camera comes from the DOE, while financial support for the telescope and site facilities, the data management system, and the education and public outreach infrastructure of LSST comes primarily from the National Science Foundation (NSF).