Peering Into Infinity With the World’s Biggest Astronomy Camera

The world is ready to peer into infinity through the biggest digital astronomy camera.

Transcript

00:00 Imagine a camera so powerful that it can clearly spot a gulf boar from 24km away.

00:07 That's possible for a legacy survey of Space and Time Camera, the world's biggest digital astronomy camera.

00:14 It's been put together at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

00:19 The camera will be shipped to its permanent home, the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile in May.

00:24 So this camera has to get from California down to Chile and up a mountain top.

00:30 Turns out that's actually a pretty delicate process.

00:33 This thing is, it's not particularly fragile.

00:35 It's designed to survive earthquakes on the top of a Chilean mountain top.

00:39 But it is something that we want to take care of on the shipment and it comes with a lot of support hardware.

00:45 The camera is massive, weighing some three tons.

00:49 It has a resolution of 3.2 billion pixels and is the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy.

00:56 Once installed, it will be able to take about a thousand pictures every night, gathering up to 20 terabytes of data.

01:03 Over the next 10 years, the camera will observe the southern hemisphere sky every night.

01:08 Each of the images it captures will cover a surface equivalent to 40 times that of the moon.

01:14 Taking that many pictures, in addition to having them being of more of the sky,

01:17 in addition to having them being able to see really far,

01:20 it's just a really powerful combination of being able to collect a lot of data.

01:25 And I like to think of it as, if you're looking for a needle in a haystack,

01:29 which is essentially what you're doing when you're trying to find something cool in space,

01:32 the more haystacks you have, the more likely you are to find some needles.

01:36 With all these images, scientists are hoping to peer deeper into some of the mysteries in the universe,

01:42 including dark matter and dark energy.

01:45 They also plan to zoom in on smaller objects in the solar system,

01:49 to gain a better understanding of how it was formed.

01:52 The camera may also have a role in identifying incoming threats from asteroids.

01:57 After working on the project for nearly 20 years,

02:00 many of the people involved are eager to see what the new camera discovers.

02:05 It's really bizarre.

02:06 So for the engineers like myself, it feels like we're tying a bow on it, sending it out the door.

02:12 It feels like it's coming to a close.

02:14 But in reality, it's just this cool transition to kind of handing it over to the operations team

02:19 and the scientists, because for them, it's like they're itching to get all this data.

02:23 So it's this transitional phase, and it's just really exciting to be a part of it.

02:27 The camera is scheduled to be installed at the Vera Rubin Observatory in May,

02:32 with its first images released to the public in 2025.

02:36 Justine Wu and Sani Qi for Tawan Plus.

02:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]