After two decades of work, the camera 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 last major part of Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey telescope, which will be installed after several months of rigorous testing.
Successfully and safely transporting the SUV-sized camera from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, where it has been built over the past 20 years, to the observatory’s mountaintop location in the Chilean Andes is no small feat.
Related: The world’s largest digital camera is ready to explore the dark universe
The camera weighs 6,600 pounds (3 metric tons) and is over five feet (1.5 meters) wide — the largest camera ever made for astronomy. So, to minimize risk to the $168 million eyepiece, scientists and engineers conducted a “full dress rehearsal” in 2021 by shipping a mass analog of the camera to Chile. The simulator was equipped with data recorders to document the conditions the real thing would experience during the trip.
“Transporting such a sensitive piece of equipment around the world involves many risks. With ten long years of work to assemble the camera, culminating in a ten-hour flight and a winding dirt road up a mountain, it was important to get everything right,” Margaux Lopezmechanical engineer at SLAC who led the camera delivery planning, said ua statement. “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 shipped to the San Francisco airport for a 10-hour flight to Chile. He rushed in Boeing 747, which landed the next day at Santiago International Airport in Chile, the closest airport to the Rubin Observatory that could accommodate an aircraft of this size.
By the next evening, the camera and its convoy of nine trucks were safe inside a guarded gate at the base of Cerro Pachon. The next morning, he traveled 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 survives, but also arrives in perfect condition,” Kevin Reilscientist for the Rubin observatory, said ua statement. Inspections after arrival confirmed that the camera was not exposed to any unexpected stresses during the long drive.
“Early indications — including data collected by data loggers, accelerometers and impact sensors — suggest we were successful,” Reil said.
The camera’s successful arrival at the observatory no doubt comes as a relief not only to all the scientists and engineers working on the camera, but also to a generation of astronomers eagerly awaiting the observatory’s first light, currently scheduled for late next year.
Then the Rubin Observatory — formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope — will conduct a landmark decade-long survey universe by generating a panorama of the southern sky every few nights, which will catalog about 37 billion objects. This survey is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is how the camera got its name.
“Getting the camera to the top was the last big piece of the puzzle,” he said Victor Krabbendam, head of the LSST project. “With all of Rubin’s components physically in place, we are on our way to transformative science with LSST.”
LSST camera set a world record 2020 when he took the largest single photo with a giant digital camera. Scientists 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 ten-year survey, astronomers hope to glean clues about the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which together make up over 90 percent of the mass of our universe, but have yet to be directly detected. Most notably, the LSST camera will search and study for signs of weakness gravitational lens, a cosmic phenomenon that occurs when a massive galaxy bends or distorts the light of background galaxies. By studying these lensed structures, astronomers can map how dark matter is distributed in and around a lensed 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.
