Astronomers Build Digital Camera As Big As A Car To Study Space
With the camera's high resolution, astronomers aim to catalogue over 7.9 billion galaxies.
By Sukhbir Cheema — 08 Apr 2024, 02:32 PM
American astronomers have built the largest digital camera on Earth and it's as big as a car
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California have completed the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, and it's touted to revolutionise the way humans study space.
The camera will be utilised at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile to capture deep space images from 2025 onwards
The camera weighs three metric tons and will be mounted on the observatory's 27.5-foot-wide Simonyi Survey Telescope, allowing for rapid sky surveys.
With the camera's high resolution, astronomers aim to catalogue over 7.9 billion galaxies
Professor at the University of Washington, Mario Juric, envisions the camera as a "crawler and Google search for the sky", democratising access to astronomical data.
"Now, rather than going to a large telescope (which sometimes can take months to propose, approve, and execute), a scientist will be able to go to a website, run a query, and get to the data in seconds. Huge improvement in efficiency and a democratization of access to best possible datasets," Juric said to Mashable.
The telescope promises groundbreaking insights into asteroids, icy worlds, and potentially even Planet X, a hypothetical planet beyond Neptune's orbit that has not yet been directly observed.
