SLAC 3,200-megapixel camera: World's largest digital camera

SLAC is leading the construction of the 3,200-megapixel camera, which will be the size of a small car and weigh more than 3 tons. 

The digital camera will be the largest ever built, allowing LSST to create an unprecedented archive of astronomical data that will help researchers study the formation of galaxies, track potentially hazardous asteroids, observe exploding stars and better understand mysterious dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the universe. 

Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Plans for the construction of the world's largest digital camera at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have reached a major milestone.

The 3,200-megapixel centerpiece of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will provide unprecedented details of the universe and help address some of its biggest mysteries, has received key "Critical Decision 2" approval from the DOE.

"This important decision endorses the camera fabrication budget that we proposed," said LSST Director Steven Kahn.

"Together with the construction funding we received from the National Science Foundation in August, it is now clear that LSST will have the support it needs to be completed on schedule."

Science operations are scheduled to begin in 2022 with LSST taking digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights from atop a mountain called Cerro Pachón in Chile.

It will produce the widest, deepest and fastest views of the night sky ever observed.

Over a 10-year time frame, the observatory will detect tens of billions of objects, the first time a telescope will catalogue more objects in the universe than there are people on Earth, and will create movies of the sky with details that have never been seen before.

LSST will generate a vast public archive of data, approximately 6 million gigabytes per year, that will help researchers study the formation of galaxies, track potentially hazardous asteroids, observe exploding stars and better understand dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the universe but whose nature remains unknown.

"The telescope is a key part of the long-term strategy to study dark energy and other scientific topics in the United States and elsewhere," said David MacFarlane, SLAC's director of particle physics and astrophysics.

"SLAC places high priority on the successful development and construction of the LSST camera, and is very pleased that the project has achieved this major approval milestone."

This is a rendering of the LSST observatory (foreground) atop Cerro Pachón in Chile. 

When LSST starts taking images of the entire visible southern sky in 2022, it will produce the widest, deepest and fastest views of the night sky ever observed. 

Over a 10-year time frame, LSST will image several tens of billions of objects and create movies of the sky with unprecedented detail. 

Credit: Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project Office

The LSST team can now move forward with the development of the camera and prepare for the "Critical Decision 3" review process next summer, the last requirement before actual fabrication of the camera can begin.

Components of the camera, which will be the size of a small car and weigh more than 3 tons, will be built by an international collaboration of labs and universities, including DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and SLAC, where the camera will be assembled and tested.

"Many excellent, hard-working people have been developing LSST for a long time and it is gratifying to see the quality of their efforts being recognized by the DOE approval," said Steve Ritz of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the lead scientist of the camera project. "We are all excited about the amount of great science that LSST will enable."

National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO): App to review Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Data

The Large Magellanic Cloud, an irregular galaxy, is visible in the night sky over the Earth's Southern Hemisphere and may contain hidden astronomical wonders yet to be revealed in the images collected by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). 

Credit: NASA)

University of Arizona computer scientists are teaming up with astronomers at the National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO) to develop a computer program that will sort through the millions of objects detected by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and create a list of priorities for astronomers to investigate.

The project has recently received a three-year INSPIRE grant, worth more than $700,000, from the National Science Foundation.

"The University of Arizona and NOAO were among the original founding members of the LSST project, making our collaboration to help ensure its success especially appropriate," said Tom Matheson, an associate astronomer at the Tucson-based NOAO.

High in the Andean peaks of Chile, work is underway to build a telescope that will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere of the sky every three nights for 10 years.

The LSST will create a map of the sky unlike any other, showing changes in astronomical objects almost as they happen over the 10-year period, and opening a floodgate for new astronomical discoveries and research worldwide as new objects are detected each night.

Located in the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Chile, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere of the sky every three days for ten years beginning in 2022. 

Credit: Suzanne Jacoby /LSST Project Office

Photographing a portion of the southern sky every 37 seconds each night, the LSST will compile a database of approximately a thousand images per night.

"We can take the picture from one night and subtract it from the picture from three nights before. Everything that has changed will show up in the image, so we can study how the sky varies," Matheson said.

"What we'll get is essentially a movie of the entire southern sky. At the end of the 10 years we can add up all the images and get a really deep picture of objects over the entire southern sky. It's a really fantastic science resource for astronomy," he added.

"It's also a huge amount of data," Matheson said. "In any one of those frames there will be about 10,000 things that change, so that's 10 million objects per night that have changed and we're going to have to figure out what of those is astronomically interesting."

While other astronomy projects are underway around the world to conduct similar surveys, none has ever attempted to map the sky on a scale such as this.

The problem: How to compare between 1 million and 10 million astronomical objects spotted each night by the LSST to the catalog of known objects, prioritize them based upon different factors, and generate a list of most important objects upon which astronomers around the world may train their telescopes.

The team: Matheson, UA associate professor of computer science and member of the UA BIO5 Institute, John Kececioglu, UA professor of computer science, Rick Snodgrass, UA professor of computer science, and NOAO astronomer Abhijit Saha.