Oriented on making people closer

The LSST telescope, or Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, intended constantly for monitoring the sky, will get the largest lens in history with a diameter of 157 cm.

In fact, this is the largest digital camera in the world, with a resolution of 3200-MP (for comparison, while smartphones have just recently switched to 100-megapixel cameras).

The resolution of 3.2 gigapixels is so high that to view such a pixel-to-pixel image, it’s necessary 378 4K TVs: for example, and a Golf ball can be seen at a distance of about 25 kilometers.

The LSST Camera consists of 189 individual sensors created using CCD charging technology. Each of them has a resolution of 16 megapixels. These sensors are grouped into blocks of 9 units and each of them costs $3 million.

The camera can detect objects that are 100 million times dimmer than the human eye can observe. It can photograph a candle flame from a distance of thousands of kilometers. To do this, the photo sensors are cooled till cryogenic temperatures to reduce extraneous noise.

This photo module will be installed at the Rubin Observatory in Chile. Astronomers will use it to conduct a grandiose data capsule, making a full panorama of the southern hemisphere sky every few nights for 10 years.

The collected data will be placed in the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) catalog, which has already collected information about galaxies that exceed the number of people on Earth. The catalog also contains data on the movements of a huge number of space objects.

Scientists hope that acquiring the new camera, they will not only get the most impressive astronomical movie, but also shed light on some of the greatest mysteries of the Universe, including dark matter and dark energy.

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