Engineers in Northern California are in the final stages of completing the world’s biggest digital camera. Seven years have been spent building the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera. It is roughly the size of a small car and has a 3,200-megapixel sensor. The camera weighs about three tons and holds a Guinness world record for the largest digital camera of its kind in the world. It was unveiled this week by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
The LSST camera works like any other digital camera, but it is way bigger and more powerful than any digital camera on the market. It has about 189 sensors that take in light from celestial bodies like stars and convert it into digital images. Each sensor is square and packs more pixels than the camera on the iPhone 13. The LSST camera has a whopping 3.2 Gigapixels, which will allow the camera to spot a golf ball from 15 miles away. The camera will be used at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of Chile, where it’ll be used to observe the southern sky. Scientists have predicted that the LSST camera will help discover 17 billion new stars and 6 million new objects in our solar system.
While the recently launched James Webb telescope takes a deeper look into the vastness of space, the LSST camera will take a much wider view. Once the LSST camera is in operation, it’ll have the ability to capture a detailed panorama of the sky every night. Once the ten-year project is completed, the LSST camera will have created a 3D film of the entire southern sky, which will enable us to see things on a timescale that hasn’t been possible before.
Risa Wechsler, a professor of physics at Stanford University, said, “It enables us to ask really big questions. What is the universe made of? What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? ” Scientists at SLAC will spend a few more months testing the LSST camera. Once the testing is completed, the camera will be shifted to the observatory on top of the mountain at Cerro Pachon in northern California.