Gamingdeputy reported on February 11 that the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States is about to complete the construction of a giant astronomical camera. The camera will be installed at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of Chile to capture the magnificence of the universe. image.
The camera, called the LSST camera, is about 1.65 meters tall and weighs 2,800 kilograms, about the size of a small SUV. The laboratory recently released photos of the camera in a clean room, and its huge lens is impressive. According to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory,This camera is the largest camera ever built for astronomical research.
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The LSST camera will be mounted on the observatory's 8.4-meter-wide Simonyi Survey Telescope, a revolutionary instrument in its own right. It will be the fastest giant telescope on Earth, capable of rotating 180 degrees in just 20 seconds.
The goal of the project is to create an unprecedented catalog of cosmic objects. “This will be the first time in history that telescopes have recorded more galaxies than there are people on Earth,” the lab explains.
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This giant digital camera captures a 15-second exposure every 20 seconds. The camera is so large that each image covers more than 40 times the area of the sky as the full moon.
This massive telescope and its giant camera will allow astronomers around the world to study our solar system, the Milky Way, and more distant objects faster than ever before.
“We think of ourselves as building a 'sky crawler and Google search,'” Mario Juric, a professor at the University of Washington who worked on the Vera Rubin Observatory project, told Mashable in 2023. “Now, instead of spending months proposing, approving, and executing large telescope observing projects, scientists can simply go to a website, run a query, and get data in seconds. This will greatly increase efficiency and enable all Everyone has easy access to the best data sets.”
How this telescope will change our understanding of space:
Over the past few centuries, astronomers and space agencies such as NASA have discovered approximately 1.2 million asteroids in our solar system. After 3 to 6 months of observations, the Rubin Observatory will double this number, and within 10 years we will discover as many as 5 million asteroids.
The number of icy objects outside the solar system (including “trans-Neptunian objects” beyond Neptune and dwarf planets) will increase by about 10 times.
There are currently only two known interstellar comets, and the Rubin Observatory will discover 10 to 50 times as many interstellar comets.
“If 'Planet Its orbit may be far beyond Pluto.
Gamingdeputy notes that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is not the only giant future telescope that is about to begin observing the night sky. The Giant Magellan Telescope will be commissioned later this decade to study the evolution of the universe and the properties of planets outside our solar system (exoplanets). In addition, The Extremely Large Telescope, with a mirror width of 39 meters, will become the largest optical telescope on Earth later this decade.