The world’s largest Digital cameras are finally in the spotlight. While a very powerful personal camera can have megapixel resolutionAstronomers have built an instrument that can take pictures of the distant universe with 3.2 gigapixel resolution. (One gigapixel is equal to 1,000 megapixels.)
That camera will be instrumental in supporting the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s telescope, which has been in operation for about two decades but is nearing completion. In late September, scientists and technicians working in a giant cleanroom at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, completed the assembly of the machine’s mechanical components. photos are sensitive and they are currently conducting tests before final installation.
“With the combination of the camera’s massive focal plane and a 25-foot mirror to gather light, Aaron Roodman, astrophysicist at SLAC and deputy director of the Rubin Observatory, said in a statement. we are matchless. He mentions that both the 5.5 foot lens, comes with its own extra-large lens cap, and the focal plane is in Guinness Book of World Records because of their extraordinary size.
Engineers will test the camera for about two months, and in May the team will put it on a chartered flight to the telescope’s site in the desert mountains of northern Chile. Scientists will conduct the telescope’s first imaging tests in the second half of 2023, and they are aiming for the official launch of Rubin, known as the “first light,” in March next year. 2024.
That’s when the telescope will start collecting 20 terabytes of data every night for 10 years. With it, scientists will build a vast map of the sky as seen from the Southern Hemisphere, including 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars in the Milky Way — a substantial portion of all galaxies. galaxies in the universe and all the stars in our galaxy, Roodman said. They will also accumulate images of 6 million small planet and other objects in our solar system. Such a huge cosmic database would have been unthinkable until very recently.
It is the opposite of the approach used for Hubble or James Webb space telescope, which can zoom in to capture breathtaking images of narrow slices of the sky. Instead, Rubin will continuously scan the entire southern sky — about 18,000 square degrees — collecting data on every viewable object and photographing each area 825 times at a range of optical wavelengths. Rubin will also go deeper and chart the universe more than its predecessors, like Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Dark Energy Survey.
Fire hydrants containing a lot of precious data will come thanks to this new camera that weighs almost 3 tons. Its image sensor is made up of more than 200 custom-designed charge-coupled devices (CCDs), and they capture images with six filters that cover the electromagnetic spectrum, from violet to near-infrared.
The camera takes a picture of each patch of the sky every three days, providing snapshots that can be used together to check for faint or distant objects, or point-shifting objects, such as Supernova explosion and the path of near-Earth asteroid and comets slowly move in their orbits. “It’s making a 10-year color film,” said Risa Wechsler, an astrophysicist at Stanford University and a member of the scientific advisory committee of the Rubin Observatory. “And on top of that, it stacks the frames of that movie to get a real picture of depth. That would give us a map of all the galaxies, which locates all the matter, mostly dark matter. We’ll see what the universe looked like billions of years ago and learn more about dark matter.”
