After two decades of work, the camera is at the heart of the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory arrived at his home last week. It is now located on top of Cerro Pachón in Chile.
This camera is the final major part of Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope, which will be installed after several months of rigorous testing.
It is no small feat to successfully and safely transport an SUV-sized camera from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, where it has been built for the past 20 years, to a mountaintop observatory site in the Chilean Andes.
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The camera weighs 6,600 pounds (3 metric tons) and spans over 1.5 meters – the largest camera ever made for astronomy. To minimize risk to the $168 million eyepiece, scientists and engineers conducted a “full dress rehearsal” in 2021 by sending a mass analogue of the camera to Chile. The simulator was equipped with data loggers that documented the conditions the real thing would experience during the trip.
“Transporting such a delicate piece of equipment around the world involves a lot of risk. With ten long flights of camera assembly work culminating in a ten-hour flight and a winding dirt road up a mountain, it was important to get it right,” Margaux Lopezmechanical engineer at SLAC, who led the camera’s delivery planning, said va declaration. “But because we had the experience and the data from the test shipment, we were extremely confident that we could keep the camera safe.”
On May 14, the camera was sent to the San Francisco airport for a 10-hour flight to Chile. It flew Boeing A 747 cargo plane that landed the next day at Santiago International Airport in Chile, the closest airport to the Rubin Observatory that could accommodate a plane that large.
By the next evening, the camera and its convoy of nine trucks were safely inside the guarded gate at the base of Cerro Pachón. The next morning, they hiked for five hours on a winding dirt road, covering 21.7 miles (35 kilometers) to the top of the mountain, which is more than 8,900 feet (2,713 meters) above sea level.
“Our goal was to ensure that the camera not only survived, but arrived in perfect condition,” Kevin Reillya scientist from the Rubin observatory, said va declaration. Post-arrival checks verified that the camera had not encountered any unexpected stress during its long journey.
“Initial indications – including data collected by data loggers, accelerometers and shock sensors – indicate that we have been successful,” Reil said.
The camera’s successful arrival at the observatory is undoubtedly a relief not only to all the scientists and engineers working on the camera, but also to a generation of astronomers who are eagerly awaiting the observatory’s first light, which is currently set for late next year.
That’s when the Rubin Observatory — formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope — will conduct a landmark 10-year study universe creating a panorama of the southern sky every few nights that will catalog about 37 billion objects. This survey is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, after which the camera is named.
“Getting the camera to the top was the last big piece of the puzzle,” he said Victor Krabbendam, LSST project manager. “With all the components of Rubin physically in place, LSST and I are on our way to transformative science.”
LSST camera set a world record in 2020, when he took the largest single image of a giant digital camera. The researchers say just one of its 3,200-megapixel images would require 378 4K ultra-high-definition televisions. The resolution is so good that a golf ball can be seen from 15 miles (25 kilometers) away in this camera’s portraits.
Using data from the 10-year survey, astronomers hope to gain clues about the nature of dark matter dark energy, which together make up over 90 percent of the mass of our universe, but have not yet been directly detected. Most notably, the LSST camera will search for and study the faint signatures gravitational lenses, a cosmic phenomenon that occurs when a massive galaxy bends or distorts light from background galaxies. By studying these lenticular structures, astronomers can map how dark matter is distributed in and around the lenticular galaxy.
“We expect the observatory to make many discoveries – things we didn’t even know existed before,” Director Vera C. Rubin Steven Kahnan astrophysicist at Stanford University in California, previously told Space.com.