- Title: World's largest digital astronomy camera en route to Chile
- Date: 19th April 2024
- Summary: MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (APRIL 11, 2024)(REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE)(English) HANNAH POLLEK, MECHANICAL ENGINEER AT SLAC, SAYING: "It's really bizarre. So for the engineers like myself, it feels like we're tying a bow on it, sending it out the door, it feels like it's coming to a close. But in reality, it's just this cool transition to kind of handing it over to the operations team and the scientists, because for them it's like they're itching to get all this data. So it's this transitional phase and it's just really exciting to be a part of it."
- Embargoed: 3rd May 2024 22:49
- Keywords: ASTRONOMY CAMERA PHOTOGRAPHY SPACE
- Location: MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- City: MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- Country: US
- Topics: Information Technologies / Computer Sciences,North America,Science
- Reuters ID: LVA008478512042024RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Assembly of the world's largest digital astronomy camera is now complete and ready to ship to its new home atop Cerro Pachón, an 8,900 foot mountain in Chile. Engineers and scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California assembled the 3,200 megapixel camera, which weighs approximately 3,000 kilograms.
Once installed, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera will be capable of producing approximately 1,000 images and 15 to 20 terabytes of data a night as scientists use it to study dark energy, dark matter, the distribution of galaxies and more.
"Taking 1,000 pictures a night is wild. That is not something that is currently done by other telescopes and so taking that many pictures in addition to having them be of more of the sky, in addition to having them being able to see really far, is just a really powerful combination of being able to collect a lot of data,” Margaux Lopez, one of the mechanical engineers at SLAC who helped assemble the LSST, told Reuters.
"And I like to think of it as if you're looking for a needle in a haystack, which is essentially what you're doing when you're trying to find something cool in space, the more haystacks you have the more likely you are to find some needles. And so we are putting together a million haystacks and we are really confident that there are going to be some pretty fun needles in there", she said.
The camera will arrive in Chile next month and be installed atop the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The public can expect to see the first images from the LSST in 2025.
(Production: Dylan Bouscher) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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