After two decades of work, the camera at the heart of the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory arrived home last week. It is now perched atop the Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile.
This camera is the last major part of Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope, on which it 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 for the past 20 years, to the observatory’s mountaintop location in the Chilean Andes is no small feat.
Connected: The world’s largest digital camera is ready to explore the dark universe
The camera weighs 6,600 pounds (3 metric tons) and stretches over five feet (1.5 meters) across—the largest camera ever built for astronomy. So, to minimize the risk to the $168 million eyepiece, scientists and engineers did a “full rehearsal” in 2021, sending a tabletop analogue of the camera to Chile. The simulator was equipped with data loggers to document the conditions the real thing would experience during the trip.
“Transporting such a delicate piece of equipment around the world involves great risk. With ten long years of work to assemble the camera, culminating in a ten-hour flight and winding dirt road up the mountain, it was important to get it right.” Margot Lopezmechanical engineer at SLAC, who led the camera’s delivery planning, said in a 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 sent to the San Francisco airport for a 10-hour flight to Chile. Flew into a 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 such a large aircraft.
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, he traveled 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 make sure the camera not only survived, but also arrived in perfect condition,” Kevin Raylescientist at the Rubin Observatory, said in a statement. Post-arrival inspections confirmed that the camera had not experienced any unexpected stresses during its long journey.
“Initial indications — including the data collected by the data loggers, accelerometers and impact sensors — suggest we’ve succeeded,” Rail 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, which is currently scheduled for late next year.
Then the Rubin Observatory – formerly known as the Large Synoptic Telescope – will conduct a remarkable decade-long survey of The universe by generating 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, for which the camera is named.
“Getting the camera to the top was the last big piece of the puzzle,” said Victor Crabendam, LSST project manager. “With all of Rubin’s components physically in place, we are on the cusp of transformative science with LSST.”
The LSST camera set a world record in 2020 when he took the largest single photo from a giant digital camera. Scientists say just one of its 3,200-megapixel images would require 378 ultra-high-definition 4K TVs. The resolution is so good that the golf ball can be seen from 15 miles (25 kilometers) away in this camera’s portraits.
Using data from a 10-year survey, astronomers hope to gather 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. Mostly, the LSST camera will look for and study signs of weakness gravitational lenses, a cosmic phenomenon that occurs when a massive galaxy bends or distorts light from background galaxies. By studying these lensing structures, astronomers can map how dark matter is distributed in and around the lensing galaxy.
“We expect the observatory to make a lot of discoveries—things we didn’t even know existed before,” Vera S. Rubin, Director Stephen Kahnan astrophysicist at Stanford University in California, previously told Space.com.
